Videos by the farmers and for the farmers……BY POOJA CHATURVEDI
In the village of Kamlikoppa in Karnataka, a group of people gather to watch a film starring fellow farmer Gaurav Channapa.
Channapa is teaching them a lowcost way to produce vermicompost a compost technique that utilizes worms which will allow harvesting every six weeks. Channapa’s video was produced by Digital Green, a non-profit organization that disseminates targeted agricultural information to small and marginal farmers.
They do this through digital localized videos, which can take into account differences in sociology and climate from region to region in India.
Even small things, such as the type of houses or the clothing style, can make a huge dif- ference in people’s acceptance of a video and their willingness to learn from it, says Rikin Gandhi, founder of Digital Green.
Conceptualized after a visit to a friend’s biodiesel project in Karnataka, Digital Green be- gan in 2006 as a Microsoft Corp. research project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Deshpande Foundation.
Gandhi spent six months testing various video schemes in the villages of Karnataka, and the project is now active in at least 100 villages in Jharkhand, Orissa, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.
Digital Green has partnered with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in these states to train young farmers to shoot, edit and screen films.
Villagers pay a nominal `2-4 to watch the screenings.
S.B. Nadagouda, Digital Green’s development manager for Kar- nataka, said training the rural youth has been remarkably easy, thanks to their enthusiasm.
Gandhi plans to extend his project to at least 1,200 villages in next three years.
The objective of Digital Green, he says, was never to follow the traditional method of stuffing farmers with information that might be general or doesn’t leave any scope for further interaction. Our videos are by the farmers and for the farmers, taking into account queries and issues of local interest.