Ashwamedha

Muthu Subramanian K
TAPMI, Manipal
 Problems
 Increase in population
 Changes in climate – thus affecting rainfall
 Limited land availability for agriculture
(saturated at 142 million hectares for more than
a decade)
 Need
 Need for increased agricultural output
 Need for reducing wastage of water
 Irrigation requires overall
improvements
 Specifically Cities: Rain water harvesting
 Agricultural lands: Using techniques like low
cost drip irrigation and sprinklers
 Simple techniques to collect water in places
where salt is collected.
 Reduce wastage
 Reduce water pollution
 Other improvements
 Using techniques like
 SRI (System of Rice Intensification)
 Precision Agriculture
 Integrated Farming
 The Organization
 The organization will be an NGO
 Employing people from technical and practical
knowledge
 Members would include farmers from the
localities
 NGO would get its training and inputs from
different government and non-government
organizations
 Profits will be put back into the organization
 The Plan
 Provide technological and consulting services to farmers on
 Farming
 SRI
 Precision farming
 Integrated farming
 Irrigation
 Drip irrigation
 Sprinklers
 The above consulting services would reduce the wastage and
would increase the output per drop of water. Thus indirectly
increasing the land under irrigation.
 The Plan
 Funding
 Funds would be collected from donations, mainly from corporate CSR
divisions
 Government subsidies
 Operations
 Consulting
 Better crop for the season (farmers preferences would also be
considered)
 The equipments like GPS, Computers etc. would be shared for a
particular region and nearby regions
 More open source technologies (with customizations) would be used.
 Farmers would be charged on per crop and land area basis or on
profit sharing basis
 The Plan
 Operations (continued)
 Irrigation
 Farmers have a choice of buying the equipment or
leasing
 In case of a lease, Farmers would be repaying on
monthly basis.
 Farmers would be persuaded to join with near by farmers
for irrigating better and sharing costs.
 A way (and reason) to combine land areas for
effective irrigation
 The Plan
 Marketing
 Talking to the farmers about the benefits
 Initially, a free trial on one of the lands in the area to
demonstrate the effectiveness.
 Testimonials from places like Dharmapuri, where
some of these techniques have been used