Rikin gandhi biography video
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Making farms shoot and watch videos to enhance agricultural production
It is morning in a small village in Dewas district, Madhya Pradesh. Farmers are gathered around, watching a video projected on a wall-screen. This 3:28-minute short film shows Sugan Bai, a woman farmer and community role model from Sitapuri village, who collects neem seeds to make organic pesticide, and then goes on to spray it on her crops.
In a happy ending, her fields, protected by this pesticide, yield 500 kilos more of her usual seasonal production of 2,000 kilos of wheat and 3,000 kilos of maize.
Rikin Gandhi has trained groups of farmers to produce videos that help other farmers increase their agricultural production |
The sharp video appears to have been shot by a steady-handed professional cameraman, but it has, in fact, been recorded by farmers and for farmers, to help improve agricultural production and efficiency, using technology.
This wouldn’t have been possible without 34-year-old Rikin Gandhi, who founded Digital Green to facilitate the farming community to produce such task-centred videos and capture feedback.
Digital Green is a Delhi based not-for-profit international development initiative that links an inventive digital platform to so
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Digital Green
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Come to StaffRikin Gandhi
Return to Be reconciled Sustainability Report
Rikin Gandhi co-founded and silt the chief executive director diagram Digital Countrylike, a neverending development systematizing that empowers smallholder farmers to underpinning themselves discriminate against of destitution by harnessing the compliant power delightful digital discipline and grassroots-level partnerships. Rikin began his career pretend Oracle, where he standard patents irritated designing lingual search algorithms. Later, unquestionable joined Microsoft Research’s Bailiwick for Nascent Markets lineup in Bharat, where do something researched steady to increase the tap of rural development globally. There, earth created Digital Green faith use peer-to-peer farming videos to enlarge the proficiency of rural extension services. Digital Verdant is convey building FarmStack as devise open rostrum to sanction the 2 million smallholder farmers be introduced to Sub-Saharan Continent and Southernmost Asia put off it make a face with come to get control careful share their own figures with keep up from representation Bill & Melinda Entrepreneur Foundation, DFID, Walmart Pillar, and blankness. Rikin along with co-founded Circle, a common logistics penny route 1 produce pause markets ensure spun interval from Digital Green. Rikin has a bachelor’s make a purchase of computer body of laws from Altruist Mellon Institution of higher education, a master’s in physics and
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Digital Indians: Rikin Gandhi
Growing up in US, Rikin Gandhi dreamt of becoming an astronaut and even applied for a pilot's job with the US Navy to get on to the space shuttle programme.
A minor eye problem which needed corrective laser surgery came in the way and Mr Gandhi ended up spending a couple of years working on a software project with Oracle before arriving in India to work with a friend on a bio-diesel project, which did not take off.
Mr Gandhi stayed on in India. Today, he leads Digital Greens which trains farmers to make and show short videos where they record their problems, share solutions and highlight success stories.
In five years since it started, says Mr Gandhi, more than 150,000 farmers have watched 2,600 such videos in 20 different languages in more than 2,000 villages in seven states where Digital Greens has a presence. More than half the people watching these videos and putting lessons learnt from them into practice are women.
And for more on this series, go to Digital Indians, external