Robot-assisted tech platform to help a million farmers

An ambitious project is in the offing to bring on board a million farmers across the country on a platform using blockchain technology and assisted by robots.

The University of Hyderabad (UoH) has got a grant of Rs 1 crore from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for the project. Prof. Vijaya B Marisetty and Dr Varsha Mamidi from the School of Management Studies will be leading the effort to develop the pilot phase of the blockchain platform.

The platform enables Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) to engage with farming ecosystem players, including lenders, input suppliers and output customers.

The Union Government had launched the Scheme of “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 FPOs” in 2021 to create these FPOs by 2027-28 with a total budgetary outlay of Rs 6,865 crore.

As per the scheme, the formation and promotion of FPO is based on two broad parameters — the Produce Cluster Area approach and the specialized commodity-based approach. While adopting a cluster-based approach, the formation of FPOs will be focused on “One District One Product” (ODOP) for the development of product specialization.

Given that blockchain technology provides security, trust and transparency, the project expects more value chain benefits and more equal distribution of wealth for farmers. The project will run for two years and later it is expected to be scaled up as a pan-India platform, according to the UoH spokesperson.

Blockchain technology is a database mechanism that allows the transparent sharing of information within a business network. The database stores data in blocks that are linked together in a chain.

Prof. BJ Rao, Vice Chancellor, UoH, expressed confidence that Prof Marisetty and Dr Mamidi will successfully complete the project and later scale it up to the pan-India level.

Prior to this, the two faculty members had received blockchain use case grants through the Institution of Eminence (IoE) for developing cold-chain logistics platforms for the pharma industry with Dr Reddy's Laboratories as the industry partner. They have also won the international blockchain hackathon in Dubai and the blockchain hackathon run by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

(M Somasekhar is an independent journalist who specializes in Science & Technology, Agriculture, Business and start-ups based out of Hyderabad.)