Bengaluru: Agritech and social enterprise startups are increasingly focussing on health, education, sanitation and entrepreneurial initiatives in an attempt to enable farmers and their families. Besides offering tech know how and products, these startups are also looking into the emotional and educational well-being of farmers.
“We want to focus on quarterly engagement within our existing geographies where we both lend time and financial assistance,” said Shardul Sheth, Co-Founder of AgroStar. “Most recently, in a village in Gujarat, we set up the borewell process since water wasn’t available. Earlier, we have had health checkup camps.”
IDG Ventures-backed AgroStar is a mobile-commerce platform through which farmers can procure raw material by giving a simple missed call or through the startup’s mobile application. The company says it has already enabled about 40,000 farmers in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan since it launched the app in June. Delhi-based EM3 AgriServices, which provides a full range of on-farm services using modern agricultural machines and technologies on a ‘pay-for-use’ basis, is setting up a foundation that will aim to provide everything from education, electricity and health to sanitation, water and child-care services to farmers.
“It’s essential to involve yourselves in the lives of customers in order to build trust, we wanted to set up a separate foundation that focuses on the social aspect,” said Rohtash Mal, Chairman of EM3 Agri Services .
“Some of the initial necessities we have found are the need for solar lighting, ensuring doctors visit on a weekly basis for health check-ups since the primary healthcare centre is far away and providing creche facilities for the women who work in fields.”
EM3 Agri Services interacts with 15,000 farmers and will target these services to them and their families before expanding their reach. Aspada Investments-backed Barrix Agro Sciences, which provides eco-friendly solutions for pest management, aims to provide agricultural education to the children of farmers.
“We have noticed that even if the government schools are free, some of them can’t even afford the transportation cost involved in reaching the school, so we will start educating the children who are in the fields with their parents,” said Lokesh Makam, CEO of Barrix Agro Sciences.
“We will teach them everything from cultivation protocols and disease management of the crops to implementing the kinds of technology and products available for us.”
The platform, which works with two-lakh farmers, has over 200 onfield directors, who teach the farmers new techniques. Social enterprise startup Greenway Appliances, which offers biomass cooking stoves to rural women, is introducing entrepreneurial initiatives for close to 50,000 women across Tamil Nadu and some of the Northeastern states. Greenway Appliances offers two smart stoves — one with loading capacity of 25 kg, which is priced at Rs 1,499, and the other with a loading capacity of 40 kg which is priced at Rs 2,499.
The startup also organises training sessions for farm women where they are given suggestions on how to save money and how to build a credit history through a micro-credit programme. “The women are trained to manage finances,” said Neha Juneja, Co-founder of Greenway Appliances.
“They take the biomass stove for free at first and learn to collateralise their loan as a group.They can pay in weekly or monthly instalments. This is a way for them to build their credit history.”
The platform has also introduced a barter system, where women are invited to contribute their labour, which could be creative work ranging from paintings to embroidery.
Source: The Economic Times
