Meet Deepak Pareekh from Ahmedabad who wanted to bring a social impact and took the challenge of facilitating some ease in the hardship of the farmers’ lives. With this mission Pareekh started MyCrop five years back. The organisation is now successfully benefiting farmers across the globe through various innovative technologies.
“I was a corporate guy through and through and had written various books on technologies and helped many start-ups with social media data analysis. Five years back I focused on agriculture, as I wanted to do something which has a social impact,” shared Deepak who started understanding agriculture from the root and spent his first year interacting with farmers all across the globe knowing their pain points.
“Then I came up with MyCrop start-up which predominantly helps create a better value chain for import and lessen the hardships through new age technologies,“ he added.
Being honoured by the World Economic Forum back in 2018 as Technology Pioneer, Deepak is currently a member of various World Economic Forums including Future Food and Production 4.0. At present he is focusing on working with stakeholders in the agriculture sector to make farming a service where different ecosystems can be activated to help farmers closely.
As agriculture is not an easy subject to work on, he chooses farmers’ hardships over his and dedicates his heart and soul to it making their work-life easier. The current status of farmers in the country is quite challenging: MyCrop CEO briefed on the topic by sharing his point of view –
“There are various reasons behind the challenges faced by the farmers including low yields, absence of fair trade – because of which they are unable to realise the right values and the third one is the risk because of natural calamities. Three technologies come into my mind if I look into solving the problems – one is using AIMN which will be able to predict demand better, it will ensure that the crops for which there is demand, that removes the challenges of pricing and offers fair trade. Second, there is blockchain which is very popular nowadays, and impacts fairness in trade by making it more transparent. When we talk about the Mandi system, typically E-nam, it is a blockchain network in itself that has the potential to make trade fair. And the third one is about dealing with weather challenges. Currently, technology is providing general forecasting instead of hyper-local weathering information. More investment is needed to come into this space to provide exact hyper-local information to the farmers,” he notified.
There have been numerous technologies on ground zero to benefit farmers. However, none worked out for the long run, as farmers whose daily wages are hardly limited to thousand to two thousand rupees, definitely cannot afford to buy high-cost services available mostly in dollars. Deepak firmly believes that here the business models need to evolve and the government should take charge of it. But unfortunately it is not doing so and is happier providing subsidies up to six to seven thousand rupees.
However, the challenges are on both sides as technology companies are unable to gain the trust of farmers and make them use the product on the ground level dedicatedly.
Deepak concludes with an optimistic note, that if the Government of India works more on the side of demand from the farmers with the exact data available on crops and agriculture, that it will be an effective solution. It is time to distinguish the demand and supply chain and help the farmers of the country by making agriculture 30% digitised.
