India is primarily an agrarian economy, but still Indian farmers continue to be among the poorest in the world. With the diverse climatic conditions found and large areas of rich fertile land, India has a lot of potential to become one of the leading producers of various agriculture products. With presence of abundant raw materials in the form of natural resources, India lags far behind in ensuring food security for its own citizens. This state is a combined consequence of various factors, such as lack of advanced scientific methods in agriculture, unavailability of modern machinery to the farmers, lack of electricity in villages and lack of financial support. Moreover, storage and maintenance inefficiency leads to tones of food grains in the country being wasted as they rot in the storage godowns. Similarly, uninformed decisions taken at various stages of cropping by farmers carried out entirely in traditional manner also lead to low yield. Farmers across the country depend more on the practices learnt by their ancestors and take various decisions based on myths. We ourselves had direct interactions with farmers from different parts of the country. Being uneducated, they had a belief that anything for improving soil fertility must have a direct response and the more they add it, the better things should become. Same is their concept regarding fertilizer use. Unaware of heating and complexation, they add more and more fertilizer in hope of better yield and end up burning the roots. Also, what the soil lacks and what kind of fertilizers should be used is not known to them many a times. But some good practices like crop rotation are also followed by them since generations.
We, at GreenSky, have a lot of faith in our country’s potential and strongly believe that making the right information available to our farmers, regarding best practices and market prices, having a set of people dedicated to guide them at every step, can make the farmers achieve much better yields, higher profits and hence improve their conditions. A number of such initiatives have also been taken up by the government, NGOs and the private sector in this direction as well. They all have had mixed results. We hope that we can bring about a positive change in the current situation of agriculture in the country and put India at its rightful position.
GreenSky 