The Namma Raitha initiative was launched by the eKisaan Foundation, set up by US-based software professionals S.R. Gourishankar, Srikanta Bhaskara and Pramit Maakoday, across 1,300 farmers’ clubs in Bagalkot and Bijapur districts last February.
OUR PROGRAMS
Two projects are currently underway from eKisaan foundation - "Namma Raitha" and "Namma Halli - Smart Village".
Namma Raitha
"Namma Raitha" project is an initiative to empower farmers and their family members. Namma Raitha is the first project from eKisaan foundation.
Namma Raitha is an intuitive interactive farmer's platform, with multi lingual support, that acts as a catalyst to engage farmers, share best practices among farmers and facilitate higher interaction in the process. As part of “NammaRaitha” project, information is shared in an interactive manner with our farming community. This information falls broadly into 3 categories – Crop related, Real-time information, Benefits & policies.
In addition Namma-Raitha platform focusses to continuously engage/interact with farmers bringing right SMEs as needed to make an immediate positive impact to farmers. This mobile Namma Raitha platform is live since Jan 2015 with a dedicated farmer-help-center, serving 2 districts encompassing 1300 villages and 20,000 farmers. Feedback from our farmers has been very encouraging A working model is currently available and is being refined continuously with valuable inputs from farming community. We see "Namma Raitha" to be the farmer's forum & platform that will act as a catalyst to share best practices among farmers and facilitate higher interaction.
This ICT for Agri project, Namma Raitha, includes the following for our farmers:
a. Two-way communication and information aggregation & curation.
b. Localized information, as its most valuable.
c. Personalized recommendation.
d. Iterative learning.
e. Agricultural skills building.
f. Leverage Big data and cloud technologies to benefit farmers.
We would not have been here today without the support and guidance from our subject matter experts: Bagalkot Horticulture university, Karnataka Agriculture University, Dharwad. Raichur Agriculture University, Raichur. Animal husbandry college, Bangalore. Chandana TV(Doordarshan). Digital Green, Bangalore. Progressive & Enthusiastic farmers. Numerous Volunteers, well-known educationalists & physicians.
This absolutely would not have been possible without our sponsors and we are very grateful to them, for giving us the strength to make this project come to life. We believe everyone has ideas, that can make a difference. If you would like to contribute to this project, contact us with your details and areas of interest.
Namma Halli - Smart Village
With the dream of Mahatma Gandhi’s Gram Swarajya, Smart Village - an initiative program from eKisaan Foundation has been launched on August 15, 2015 for rural development. A small step towards fulfilling basic needs to our village population.
eKisaan’s Smart-Village’s vision is to “Enhance, Engage and Empower” our villages. Our Approach is to “Enhance touch points, actively Engage all people & their by Empower our village community”, with a goal to noticeably increase living standards and provide easy access to basic facilities for village population in a sustainable way
To enhance our villages, it’s a combination of upgrading/changing the existing infrastructure to meet current needs and in parallel get them connected, so that regular monitoring of these villages can happen they by necessary interventions can happen from various agencies. This smart-village framework is based on a scalable, flexible and customizable framework called “WHEEL”. This framework focusses on 5 key areas – Water, Health, Education, Energy & Land.
Badagandi village in Bilagi taluk is chosen as the pilot village for this initiative. As part of this initiative, focus will be to provide basic infrastructure in all 5 areas of WHEEL. Currently 3 of the 5 focus areas are in progress.
Plans are afoot to popularise solar energy by distributing solar lights among the households. Foundation also planning to provide all medical assistance to pregnant women at their doorsteps with the help of doctors keen to serve in rural areas.
