MIT Graduate Making a Difference in Rural India

Rikin Gandhi’s childhood dream was to join the US Air Force. After graduating in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had an offer to work at NASA’s space program.

But despite his love for the celestial, Gandhi would soon embark on a completely different — and more mundane — career: producing informational videos for small farmers inIndia.

Digital Green, an agricultural non-profit organization that he founded in India 2007, has so far produced more than 1,700 such videos and screened them to tens of thousands of farmers in rural India.

The genesis of Digital Green was a trip to India, in 2006, on a project to launch a biodiesel undertaking in Maharashtra.

Then he would go on to work at a Microsoft lab in Bangalore as a researcher in emerging markets technologies. “There I hit upon the idea of extending the benefits of [information technology] to Indian farmers,” says Gandhi.

(Later Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded by the former Microsoft chairman and his wife, became one of Digital Green’s financial backers.)

Right from the beginning, Gandhi’s strategy was to seek the help of other nonprofits in the dissemination of videos. “We roped in seven [India-based non-governmental organizations such as] Pragati, BAIF and ASA in five states — Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand and
Orissa — to make arrangement for exhibiting these videos,” says Gandhi.

Pragati, Koraput is a nonprofit in Orissa that works in the areas of soil and water conservation, among other fields. BAIF Development Research Foundation, based in Pune, promotes sustainable livelihood in the rural areas. ASA, or Action for Social Development, works with
more than 120,000 poor families in more than 1,000 villages in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar in “implementing various rural development programs, according to its website.

Digital Green is headquartered in Delhi and it has offices in Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, and Bangalore. It also has an office in Berkeley, California, for fundraising.

Digital Green’s objective is reach out to farmers with no formal education. Most of the 8-minute to 10-minute videos are shot using hand-held video cameras. The group trains farmers in 500 villages to use the equipment and basic editing software.

Subjects of the videos include a variety of farming aspects, from sustainable agriculture to the use of modern technology. There are also general awareness films.

According to the Digital Green website, more than 60,000 farmers have watched the videos, which have been screened more than 41,000 times.

Gandhi says watching the videos is not a passive exercise. “After every show, a discussion on problems [farmers are facing and ways of solving them] are held,” he says. “Based on these feedbacks, the farmers make new videos.”

Weekly screenings, on mobile projectors, take place in government buildings, such as schools, and other popular village corners. Between 30 and 50 people per district are trained to show these videos and act as facilitators.

These facilitators interact with the audience, sometimes by directly posing questions, to maintain a farmer's engagement.

Among the farmers who have enjoyed the fruits of Digital Green’s information dissemination through videos are two women from the Kamplikoppa village in Karnataka’s Dharwad district, Kalavva Lakshaman Badiger and Gauravva Channappa Morabad Badiger owns a calf and a cow, which used to give only half a liter of milk twice a day, just enough for her home consumption. After watching a film on the homemade cattle feed preparation, she realized that she is not providing nutritionally balanced feed and began using a new technique she learned from the video. Now, thanks to an increased milk production, she is able to sell milk and earn Rs. 350 a month.

Badiger has adopted best-food practices promoted by Digital Green videos in her own diet as well, with an increased intake of children’s nutritional food in her routine. In her household, where there are no small kids, all adult members are now consuming malt prepared from cereals,
as recommended by a Digital Green video.

Morabad is another villager who has adopted new technologies advocated by Gandhi’s videos. She has harvested 1,700 kg of vermicompost and earned Rs. 3,910 within six months of watching the Digital Green video. Vermicompost is a method of making fertilizers out of organic
waste by using worms.

Now, with his pioneering work increasingly becoming popular among villagers such as Badiger and Morabad, Gandhi wants to expand the Digital Green’s reach beyond the five states it is already operating in India at the moment.

He says the organization will continue to focus is on the villagers it is already working with to make them self-sufficient, “So that they could learn to make videos and extend this work even without us.” (Global India Newswire)