Reported By:
| Edited By: Priyanka Golikeri |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 02:14 AM IST
Rikin Gandhi started reading autobiographies and books on astronauts after he received his pilot’s licence and was preparing to join the US astronaut programme.
That’s when the Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus, who has a degree in computer science and masters in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, realised that several of them including Neil Armstrong, Barbara Morgan, Mae Carol Jemison had always wondered after their space journeys about the futility of war among nations, poverty and food crisis among global population.
He noted that these astronauts had gone to serve communities as educators, farmers and working to develop technology for their communities.
Coinciding with this realisation was a chance visit to rural parts of Maharashtra to understand the bio-diesel project his friends were involved in.
Gandhi saw that in the rural regions of his native country, where agriculture was the main source of employment and income, several farmers were unaware of the latest agricultural practices.
This was because there was no technology that could help in sharing information about agricultural trends in the community.
Gandhi felt that sharing knowledge on latest farming techniques and trends was the key to growth among farmers.
The Maharashtra visit and autobiographies of astronauts gave him an urge to help rural Indians. He was sure that he’d get more satisfaction working with farmers than a space visit and the short fame associated with it.
Thus while working as a researcher in the technology for emerging markets team at Microsoft Research India, Gandhi started Digital Green in 2006, a venture aimed at using technology to spread information on the latest techniques and trends in animal husbandry, rice cultivation, kitchen gardening, and other farming topics.
“We work with organisations like Pradhan, which work with farmers and we train them to produce videos with the technical expertise,” says Gandhi.
Digital Green, which was spun off into an independent entity in 2009, and received a grant of about $2.8 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has till date reached about 40,000 farmers in 600 villages in Karnataka, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Jharkhand.
Gandhi has plans of reaching 1,200 villages in the next year-and-a-half.
He says that when videos produced by farmers in local languages of short durations of 8-10 minutes are shown to villagers, they can at once connect with the concept that is explained and try and relate themselves to it.
Each farmer gets to watch one video every week and is motivated to adopt and adapt practices which other farmers have used, says Gandhi.
“The first question which farmers ask after seeing the video is the name of the farmer in the video and his village,” says US born Gandhi, who feels that being a visual medium, videos are best made to influence farmers to implement new techniques.
