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Tune in to Farmer TV
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Rikin Gandhi studied aerospace
engineering from MIT and then landed a job with Microsoft where he worked for
two years. He now makes videos with farmers in Karnataka.
He is the CEO of Digital Green, a social initiative that spreads information about new farming techniques and government-initiated agricultural schemes through videos made by farmers that are screened in villages. In 2009, Gandhi and his team of techies began their project by giving individuals in the community a crash course in filmmaking and editing. His team shoots instructional videos with farmers and then screens the film in a school or temple before an audience of villagers. The screening is followed by a discussion about how the new methods can help increase productivity. “We get more questions about who the farmer in the video is and how they can get on TV,” laughs Gandhi. Gandhi says the idea for the Digital Green initiative germinated when he realised that government schemes were falling short of meeting their target groups because they weren’t able to connect with the farmer. “The idea was to gain the trust of the people by having a video shot by one of their community members and featuring a real farmer they can identify with. That way the adoption rate of new practices is higher,” he says. Digital Green has penetrated 2,000 villages and has a bank of 2,600 videos in 20 languages. Almost 1.5lakh farmers are part of its network. A new video is screened every two weeks and 73 per cent of the video staff are rural women. |
Yolande
D’Mello DNA130505
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