This week, the Food and Water group made good progress in seeking guidance, as well as in collaborating with several important stakeholders that feature in our solution.

We met with Mariana, our previous GSI, to speak with her more about her past experiences working with and knowledge of existing Food and Water solutions in developing areas. We took away many important features that we have to keep in mind when deciding the final features that we want on our app, including a function that will address the issue of corruption or transparency to some extent, so that farmers are incentivized to partake in the use of the sensor technology on their farms. This issue of transparency was also brought up during our seminar this week with Ambassador Ashok, who talked about how the siphoning off of profits by the middlemen and “richer farmers” is a critical problem in Vizag, and how farming activities (regardless of their larger environmental impact) will carry on for the sake of profit. One solution that came up in our group discussion was the possibility of taxing farmers differently, depending on the levels of pollution tracked by their farming activities, but we also qualified that this would be tricky given that farmers would not willingly accept a technology that “audited” their farming activities, even if it was intended to benefit them in the long-run. The issue of managing issues like taxation will be difficult from a ground-up level, so we will definitely need to look more into the feasibility of such policy-level recommendations and seek further guidance from our upcoming meeting with Professor Darwin.

We have been in close contact with Edyn, a start-up company we found that already developed a sensor product that is extremely similar the one we envisioned. Finding this existing technology gives us great encouragement since we know that the solution is definitely feasible and implementable, but now, just has to overcome the barrier of the 2G network in Vizag. The main difference between us is the markets that we are targeting, so we aim to propose that they work with us in order to access a whole new market in the district of Greater Vizag. On Monday this week, our team will be meeting up with the founders of Edyn to speak with them more about the possibility of sponsoring us sensors that we can work with for the purpose of prototyping our solution in smart villages or community gardens in Vizag. Last, we have arranged to meet up with a team from Cisco to seek guidance on our refining business model, based on recommendations from our midterm presentations that they have a good model that we can potentially adopt in our final recommendation. We will make use of this meeting to also bring to light some of our concerns regarding the taxation of farmers and transparency of farming activities, and glean additional perspectives on how feasible these recommendations may be.

 

The Food and Water Group

Dhruv Singhal, Jessica Lazarus, Jean Choo, Valeria Yermakova, Sidney Lee