Supportive cost-effective technological innovations for agriculture and other rural applications, their need and business opportunity emerging from them - a project by Nehul and Pratik

              In recent times, there has been increasing support for use of technologies in making agriculture sustainable. Some of these include new disease resistant hybrids, biological pest control, reduced pesticide use and reduced amount of fertilizers. While above mentioned technologies directly increase the efficiency of use of various inputs for agriculture, there is a scope for certain supportive non-agricultural technologies to emerge and increase the productivity further.

In the first session, Prof. Anil Gupta talked about various problems including Water loss when farmer sleeps at night with tubewell switch in on state. To eliminate this problem, 

• How about an electronic system that incorporates a simple inverter based water level indicator coupled with a relay switch to automatically switch off the power to tubewell when adequate level of water has been pulled out  OR

• A device to remotely check if there is electricity, and to automatically turn the irrigation pump on and off, all through a mobile phone, thus helping the farmer avoid long travel, bad weather or hazardous locations in reaching remotely located water pumps

Given below are two examples of the existing supportive technologies:

1) Mech Bull Tractor: http://www.vigyanashram.com/
2) Nano Ganesh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_Ganesh

Methodology to be adopted 

• Study some of the existing supportive technologies and understand their reach, implementation and scalability etc. 

• Identify gaps in the current models on any of the above parameters or any new parameter

• Developing new value proposition or idea(s) for technological innovation based on above analysis

• Analyze business potential for some of the ideas we develop