Bridging the gap between the Farmers and Technology

Subbarao Hegde, CTO & CMO, Deshpande Foundation

Social entrepreneurship coupled with innovation at the grass-root level can create a ripple effect at the bottom of the pyramid, empower the rural poor, bring positive changes in the society and transform a developing country like India.  The best practices adopted at Deshpande Foundation are -

 
1.    Data Driven Agriculture Initiative was initiated to improve the efficiency in farming practices, rain water harvesting structure, Farm pond viability and its construction process model. The execution has been done with geo-tagging, impact analysis, auxiliary services and training kits.

This has facilitated the farm pond build in a lesser time and cost. Right time irrigation with effective impact analysis and increased crop yield from 4x to 6x resulted in better cotton initiative (BCI) farmers. Further, drought area farmers can do the farming continuously in the absence of rain.

 
   Future Roadmap: The use of GPS and GIS were implemented for Site-specific and precision farming, (Farm planning, Field mapping, Soil sampling, Tractor guidance, Crop scouting, Variable rate applications, Yield mapping etc.)

 
2.    Technology Driven industry specific skilling programs: - The skilling wing of Deshpande Foundation (Deshpande Education Trust) is a pioneer in residential experiential training programs in India for rural and semi-urban youth with focus on employability skills. The foundation is also focused on Skill in Village (SiV) programs.

 
We aim to bridge the skill-gap between education and employment and adopted a unique Integrated ERP (Institute resource Planning) and LMS (Learning Management System) with students’ skill analytics solution. It has a good blend of traditional instructor led classroom, activity driven experiential learning, technology driven flipped classroom and blended learning methods.

 
3.    Technology driven Navodyami (micro-entrepreneurship) program: We have created a Navodyami development system which helps them to get an organized marketing, development training kit, bank/financial credit support; ,linkages to several online platform owners (e-commerce); local markets (Santhes), data analytics with technological support,  etc. So far 1500 + successful enterprises are established and the counts is going on …!!