A system to make transactions with Indian Farmers more efficient and transparent
Tags: Farm Law, India, Farmers, Farming, Indian Politics

I truly believe in the saying, that farmers are the backbone of our nation.

Thanks to the new set of farm laws implemented in 2020 in India, farmers shall enjoy the freedom to sell their crops at a better price, anywhere and to anyone in the country. Private players coming into the scene will also increase the investments in technology, which shall help improve the productivity of the farmers as well as help build robust systems to handle transactions with the farmers.

It gives me immense pleasure to share with that me and my college team had proposed a similar idea to the Government of India in Smart India Hackathon 2018, Pune.

What is Smart India Hackathon?

Smart India Hackathon is a nationwide 36 hour Hackathon, which has been conducted by the Government of India since 2017. We stood second runner’s up under the Students Innovation category. Student’s Innovation category is a specialized category where the participants can define their own problem statement and provide a solution for the same.

Our problem statement -

To build a cloud based IOT system to make the transactions with farmers more efficient and transparent by avoiding intentional hoarding of crops and removing the dependency of middlemen(commission agents) to transfer crops from farmers to wholesalers (APMC/Private companies, etc).

Users of the system -

With the help of this system, a seller can be anyone who grows crops in India, while a buyer can be anyone who wishes to buy the crops in wholesale (wholesalers coming to APMC market, private agricultural firms, independent wholesalers)

Components of the system -

Web portal — The portal to be used by the buyers and sellers is a centralized web app hosted on AWS. Kiosk Box — Hardware to load the seller data (weight of crops/ rate decided by buyer and seller), is basically a kiosk box assembled with the following parts — a weighing scale, Aadhar card scanner, LED monitor, and a raspberry PI to connect the components and run the client application to upload the data on the portal. The kiosk box will be installed in the warehouses used by the buyers (In the current system, it can be installed in APMC markets/ Warehouses of private companies, etc).

Features and benefits provided by the system -

Authentication of buyer and seller — A scanner is used to perform Aadhaar based registration to ensure transparency in the system. IOT based weighing scale — Weighing scale was built using Nodemcu (A WiFi based controller) to upload the crop details, as well as automatically generate the price based on a dynamic MSP. calculated by the system and the additional rate agreed between seller and buyer. Dynamic generation of MSP using ML — System predicts dynamic MSP’s across different regions across the country, by training an ML model based on various parameters like rainfall, soil quality, etc. IVR system — An intelligent Interactive Voice Response system was built so that users with non smart phones can communicate with the system easily on call. This system helps the users to use different functionalities of the system (connecting to potential buyers, knowing the MSP of a particular region, etc) as well as get their doubts cleared. Warehouse management — We implemented a warehouse management system for the buyers. The buyers were provided a dashboard with interactive graphs to get some insights about crops in their warehouse. Avoid inflation of prices — Intentional hoarding of the crops result in inflated price in the market. To avoid the hoarding by the warehouses, each warehouse will have a predefined cap limit, which shall be calculated using various parameters such as area of the warehouse. Once the capacity is complete, buyers won’t be allowed to buy additional crops. Language no barrier — We localized the webapp in all the regional languages, so that language isn’t a barrier to use the application. Avoid middlemen — Middlemen(Commission agents) won’t come into the picture as farmers are directly using the portal to connect with buyers and using the kiosk box, to sell the crops directly to the buyers.

A vote of thanks —

I would firstly like to thank the Government of India, for giving us this wonderful opportunity, as well as taking steps towards the betterment of the farmers.

Thanks to my team — Sneha Dama, Rushabh Bid, Mehul Bhanushali, Nisarg Chandan, Vishal Jain for working so hard on this project and helping to put forward an idea to help the farmers of our country.

I would also like to thank our mentors — Avani Sakhpara, Irfan Siddhavatam and Rahul Kashyapfor guiding us and providing their valuable inputs at each and every part of the competition.

Readings on the farm laws implemented in 2020 —

Those who are interested to read more about the debates surrounding the farms laws implemented in 2020, check out the following links —