After the meeting with Dr.Rao, Param and Professor Darwin we have many takeaways. Overall the meeting was productive and it was incredibly valuable to get legitimate knowledge about what’s going on in India. We discussed various government entities that pertain to our subject of food and water. We learned about use cases that pertain to the ‘disruptive’ part of our solution and received guidance on where to look for pertinent information.
We have broken down our future solution as such:
- Goal: Improve the efficiency of agricultural distribution channels
2 pronged approach
- (1) Tackle quality issues in supply chain
- Find issues in supply chain
- Find sensors that solve problems. EDYN for soil, need a sensor for water.
- Flesh out incentive scheme for farmers to use our sensor package.
- (2) Disrupt APMC (place where farmers sell their produce and wholesalers buy it – all sales are controlled and monitored by an agent. This agent is incredibly corrupt and toys with prices to give himself the most profit).
- Provide a geo-tagged solution (soilsmart)
- Use existing APMC infrastructure (it’s a physical marketplace) and have half of the space allocated to everyone who uses our soilsmart platform. This curbs the power that the corrupt agents at the food distribution centers have.
- Create a co-op that certifies farmers who use our sensors to be “high quality” producers. These producers will have separate storage facilities and their goods can be sold at higher prices.
We are currently working on the due diligence of our proposed solution. It’s crucial we arrive in India with a deep and thorough understanding of the issue at hand. Because our audience will have a great deal familiarity with our topic.
The Food and Water Group
Dhruv Singhal, Jessica Lazarus, Jean Choo, Valeria Yermakova, Sidney Lee
Excellent