Magasool Vaani

We are committed to solving five problems in agriculture value chains (i) Low share of economic value at the primary producer level (ii) demand-supply mismatch and co-existence of  geographically proximate regions with scarcity and surplus (iii) poor transmission of quality and safety information along  chains - ie low transparency  (iv) long and fragmented value chains with several intermediaries only contributing to arbitrage between farm and fork (v) existing solutions are non intuitive to  weakest value-chain participants.

 We propose an IVRS based inclusive and participatory communication system for creating a digital Community Supported Agriculture (Oswald 2013) system. The system will ensure information symmetry for consumers and producers alike. 

 Primary producers’ revenue will grow 15% from direct consumer connect, incomes will become more stable from better visibility on demand and end consumers will get better prices. The food ecosystem will leave a smaller carbon and pesticide footprint from transparent shorter supply chains.

More than 80% (475 million small farmer families, CGAP 2014) of World’s farmers own less than 2 hectares of land and earn less than USD 1800 every year. Furthermore, annual incomes of small farmers can vary over a factor of three within a 4 year span due to demand-supply mismatches created by weather, unplanned cropping, pestilence etc. In Tamil Nadu (our geography for the first pilot) the fork to farm price ratio is often more than 5 for perishable produce and more than 2.5 for non-perishables due to multilayered and fragmented value chains. The role of many players in these agricultural value chains is just arbitrage and no other value creation.  7.5 million small farmers and 30 million consumers do not have a platform to interact with each other and create short, sustainable value chains that reward eco-friendly production and consumption. The lack of transparency and interactions leaves most of the value in the supply chains at the hands of a few rent seekers, thereby leaving low value for producers and end consumers.

Amidst COVID19 crisis, where social distancing is a new norm, we are successfully employing a model of Community-Supported-Agriculture (Oswald 2013) for better transmission of information over the value chain. We aim to expand our scale of operations and promote economic resilience to the poor population involved in farm-based sectors using a digital voice-based platform that allows more informed market participation for consumers and primary producers.

Our proposed system will consist of several fora of the following active players -

·         Primary producers, groups (FPOs, NGO members, informal communities)

·         Agricultural laborers

·         Primary processors for grains and pulses.

·         Traders and bulk procurers

·         Residents’ associations (including housing boards and slum clusters)

·         Transporters

Participants will interact through a simple voice based, moderated discussions on IVRS/smartphone app.  Farmer groups/farmers can place details of quantity, quality of their respective produce and price targets by simply recording their messages over phones. Consumers can provide demand and price expectations using the same channel. Using speech2text protocol and AI/ML based cartography a separate dashboard will be created to match demand with supply. Based on these insights, we will then organize transportation facilities to serve the consumers.

Our proposed solution will benefit the small farmers, rural, low-income urban population having diverse caste, class, age, gender, incomes, different socio-cultural backgrounds. This includes those in hard-to-reach segments (low literacy, rural and without Internet) and those who are at greater risk of suffering from ill health and poverty. 10% of the target members are women in the 30 to 60 age range. Many women agriculturalists have recently become primary farm-decision makers after men from their families migrated to urban areas. 

Magasool works with 50 tribal farmers and 2000+ members of a few farmer collectives, to help them process and market produce at remunerative rates. This experience of working closely with the farmers helped us identify the necessity of direct connection with the consumers. Furthermore, we have been constantly interacting with urban low-income households in Chennai since the Covid19 lockdown and understood market failures in their produce access.  Our voice and smartphone based solutions will bridge the  producer-consumer divide and reward them with at-least 10% better prices (leading to 25% profit increase for farmers) over the regular market. Farmers will receive prices that are always above the cost of production reducing incidences of distress sale.

Our mobile based technology aims to make farming more sustainable and remunerative by providing an intuitive vernacular platform for farmers, consumers and other agriculture ecosystem players to create an interactive and open marketplace. Transparent information transmission on quality and production practices will help reward farmers using low impact and healthful cultivation practices and reduce the carbon footprint of value chains by shortening supply networks. Our work aligns directly with the “sustainable food systems” challenge.

We successfully demonstrated a Community-Supported-Agriculture (CSA) model for small farmers and stranded migrant workers during the early phase of Covid19 lock down in India. For scale and reach, our  innovation layers the CSA concept over a ‘group-specific’ mobile platform, which offers a bidirectional IVRS-communication channel in vernacular languages. It not only informs expert advice to the group members; it also allows members to share their own perspective/experiences and influence their peers. Mobile Vaani has also developed speech-to-text tools for automated extraction of details from voice recording at scale.

As far as IVRS technology  is concerned, several competing products exist in the market, but none with specificity in information and richness in user experience that we can provide. Awaaz De’s (https://awaaz.de/) products come closest.  However, their platform does not support images and video which are important for high quality information transmission and engaging community discussions. Tamil Agriculture University’s IVRS based extension and the Uzhavan App for farmers provide generic information that might not be relevant to specific situations. Furthermore, these are not interactive platforms and do not allow for user-based content generation. Electronic markets promoted by Government (e-mandis) and the private sector (India Mart) are very non intuitive for small farmers and consumers and quickly get dominated by large players. 

To our knowledge, we will be the first in India to provide an interactive, scalable and expert moderated community market for farmers and end consumers.

The core process innovation is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) over a technology platform. The proposed technology solution is based on the IVRS platforms and a mobile app - Mobile Vaani (MV). The IVRS platform works on the ‘missed call’ principle, wherein users can place a call and our server cuts the incoming call and calls the users back. The call is not charged to end users. The mobile app is Android based and freely available. Thus, the target group can access the innovation for free using either feature phones or smartphones. We will make our users aware about the innovation through community meetings, flyers, village drive through etc. Community  managers will be encouraged to enroll consenting members. We will also identify lead individuals, who are relatively active in the community and aspire to assume significant positions. 

We also aim to develop technology veracity with the help of AI/ML techniques. For instance, Gram Vaani is in the process of building automated Q&A for vernacular speakers, using speech recognition techniques. In addition, it will soon launch VoiceBot functions on Mobile Vaani app. We intend to use these advanced tools to benefit target communities. For instance, once we build FAQ banks and their appropriate responses over 3-4 crop cycles, members can receive relevant answers to their queries in real time, without delays and human intervention. Thus, in the next five years, we intend to build an ecosystem of solutions for the food ecosystem using our field experiences and advanced technologies.

Mobile Vaani (MV) has been tried and tested at scale for over five years in more than 25 districts across five Indian states, and with over 2 million+ users. MV continues to penetrate and scale across more states in the country. MV has been nothing short of an information revolution in the participatory media space. The voice- based nature of the system helps jump illiteracy barriers without the need for the users to own smartphones or have an internet connection – a simple voice call is all that it takes to access the system.

 Video link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYsMQM50qCs

 Mobile Vaani has been put to use by more than 100 organisations for community media, query and grievance redressal, gender empowerment and for promoting behavior change. Impact of the technology has been well documented in several peer-reviewed journals. Few of the links are mentioned below -

Aparna Moitra et al 2016. Design Lessons from Creating a Mobile-based Community Media Platform in Rural India. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 14, 1–11. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/290960...

Dipanjan Chakraborty et al  2019. Experiences from a Mobile-based Behaviour Change Campaign on Maternal and Child Nutrition in Rural India. In THE TENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND DEVELOPMENT (ICTD ’19), January 4–7, 2019, Ahmedabad, India. https://doi.org/10.1145/328709...

Our theory of change consists of the following principal components 

(i) Communication between producers and consumers (along with existing transport solutions)  will lead to shorter agricultural value chains. Shorter value chains will improve prices for producers and consumers.

(ii) Shorter value chains will  enable “localization” of markets, reduce distances traveled by produce and reduce wastage  leading to smaller carbon footprint of agricultural value chains.  

(iii) Open communication between value-chain participants will lead to better demand-supply matches.

(iv) Transparency in the value chain will lead to increased demand for quality, food safety and ecological sustainability from the value chain.  

(iv) Intuitive technology (voice for some, smartphone applications for others) will lead to high uptake and usage by value-chain participants.

(v) Discussions of the proposed solution in public spaces will lead to higher trust and increase uptake from stakeholders. Community participation improves trust.

We  demonstrated concept feasibility during the early phase of the Covid lockdown in April 2020, Magasool Group of Institutions partnered with volunteers in Chennai to directly procure more than 3 tons of vegetables and 10 tons of watermelon from 20 farmers for distribution to more than 1000 migrant workers stranded in Chennai. Farmers received between 10% and 200% more than farm-gate prices and yet the whole operation cost less than procurement costs from the Chennai wholesale market.This seeded the  idea with Gram Vaani whose mobile platform engages more than 2 million economically and socially disadvantaged members.  

In a year’s time we plan to serve 5,000 farmers and 20,000 end consumers across Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. In 5 years we hope to scale and  reach a million consumers and 100,000 farmers in India. We will also partner with institutions in other developing countries for replication of the technology and learning.

The first 6 months of the proposal period will be used to deploy and test our scaling model and theory of change assumptions. In this period we will onboard 400 farmers and 2500 consumers from Chennai and neighboring districts (and an optimal number of other value chain players) and demonstrate that accessible avenues for direct interaction between participants greatly improves trust, opens paths for demand-supply pooling to reduce transportation costs and distances and maintain freshness of perishables. It will also create a framework of information for farm laborers to efficiently find work. Producers and consumers will be rewarded with at-least 10% better prices (leading to 25% profit increase for farmers) over the regular market. Farmers will receive prices that are always above the cost of production reducing incidences of distress sale.  Mechanisms to reward farmers for safe and sustainable produce will be developed and tested.

Post the pilot phase, we propose to reach 5,000 farmers and 20,000 end consumers across Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan in a year. Systematic monitoring and evaluation tools will be put in place to ensure timely progress towards goals and early course correction as and when required. In 5 years we hope to directly reach a million consumers and 100,000 farmers in India across 10 states.   We will open-source our learning and establish partnerships with 5 like- minded organizations in South Asia and Ethiopia for reaching millions of beneficiaries through contextualized replication.

The agriculture value chains are dominated by select-family networks and attempts at modification might face strong opposition. Mobile phone penetration in India is only at 75-80% (with large gender differences) and we run the risk of leaving out the most vulnerable population from our platform. Some of the major barriers are - 

Gender: 15% fewer women (than men) own mobile phones.  

Technological  - Digital divide - Many producers are not very comfortable with IVRS/operating mobile phones whereas  urban consumers are already on smartphones and  might prefer Whats app/smartphone  solutions.

Financial - Perfect match of demand & supply in the beginning will be difficult. So, farmers need to be compensated for the crop losses. Some support for transporting the goods from supply to demand region will be required.

Cultural - Consumers like to wander around vegetable markets and touch and feel produce before making a purchase decision. So, home delivery of agri-produce may not be always the chosen preference for many consumers.

1. Lack of mobile ownership - Encourage active users with phones to enroll others.

2. Technology usage barriers - The Mobile Vaani solution works through IVRS on feature phones and through an application for smartphones making it user friendly for customers with different technology backgrounds. Peer learning methods and community enrollment will be used for increasing tech familiarity and comfort.

3. Gender gap in mobile ownership - Help women form communities or use existing Self Help Groups to encourage participation.

4. Information gaps and asymmetries - Run targeted campaigns on specific topics. Help members form thematic groups for discussion. Post expert content and moderated Q&A

5. Hold public meetings in urban and rural commons to boost trust in the system

6. Financial - Farmers will be compensated for losses arising from challenges in demand-supply matching until the process stabilizes.

NA

The core solutioning team from Magasool Agro Pvt Ltd  consists of  four full-time staff and four part-time staff. The team will be responsible for creating and executing the process architecture. Mobile Vaani will be the technology vendor.

Magasool (meaning “agriculture yield” in Tamil)  Agro Pvt Ltd was founded  in 2015 by Dr. Ajay Tannirkulam and Mr. Jayaram Venkatesan with the aim of  produce-value addition  and market access  for smallholders and marginal farmers. Ajay has a stellar academic record and completed his Phd in Astrophysics from the University of Michigan in 2008. However, after being exposed to rural Tamil Nadu in 2009, he changed track and started working passionately for the cause of agriculturalists in Tamil Nadu. Today, Ajay and Jayaram have more than 9 years of experience working with smallholders in India. 

Magasool’s  operations are managed by a highly motivated, educated, young farmer, Mr. TamizhKumaran. He has an extensive understanding of dry-land produce and a vast network of farmers. 

Magasool’s approach is to “de-risk” the production environment through promoting cultivation of agro-ecologically-suitable crops and enabling access to urban markets for value-added produce. Reducing the intermediaries between farmers and consumers during procurement, processing, and sales, and enhancing quality of products can then guarantee a higher and better flow of income. 

The success of the Covid19-Community-Supported-Agriculture pilot with 20 farmers and 1000 migrant workers  and proactive Chennai  citizens spawned scale discussions with our technology vendor - Gram Vaani. Gram Vaani’s mobile platforms for community engagement have more than 2 million users in India and Ethiopia and 100+ paying institutional customers.

Magasool  partners with Toothukudi Pulses Producers Company and National Agro Foundation for field implementation. We  partner with Graam Vaani for tech-based scaling of our outreach and market-access efforts.  

Magasool is a mixed model of for-profit and nonprofit with the core purpose of supporting the small farmers and farm workers to earn better incomes with sustainable farm practices. It offers farming communities various services required in different stages of the crop-cycle and ensures  higher economic returns to farmers while conserving  soil nutrients and ecological resources.

Pre-harvest services are managed through non-profit entities. Post harvest food-safety and marketing services are housed in a for profit institution with not-for-profit philosophy.   Magasool works with 1500 farmers and farm workers directly and an additional 2000 farmers through cooperatives.

We wish to gain from Solve's network for the following - 

(i) Ideas and solutions (tech and non-tech) for encouraging high participation of women and the vulnerable on to our platform  

(ii) Connections with like minded institutions/individuals across the globe for exchange and validation of ideas and products 

(iii) Partnerships for replication and scale

(iv) Funding Opportunities

Our solution aims at connecting primary producers, consumers and other agri-value-chain participants though smaller processes and making the food production-distribution system more transparent. Many of the stakeholders are poor, risk averse and likely unwilling to pay for services. So, to ensure financial viability at scale we will need support in developing innovative business and revenue models that are geography/context specific.   

Furthermore, building trust and strong uptake of our platform among all participants of the value chain will require well designed dissemination tools. 

In addition, we will require the right kind of patient capital to ensure our growth and success.

We will immensely benefit from Solve's network in these areas.

Mentoring, design and networking support from  Solve members, Tata Center at MIT Faculty and the Agriculture Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI) will be invaluable. We also look forward to suggestions from Solve on suitable partnerships.  

Our core innovation is Community Supported Agriculture over a digital platform - Magasool Vaani. It can be imagined as a marketplace which ensures informed market participation of consumers and primary producers for buying and selling agricultural commodities. Magasool Vaani will also include  efforts for answering queries of stakeholders in a timely manner. Thus, we aim to promote economic resilience for the farm-producers using a voice-based and  participatory solution.

Our solution directly connects consumers with the source of their produce. The platform also allows them to directly engage with the producers for orders and feedback, completing the loop. Our vision is to make agriculture value-chains shorter and transparent for a winning market engagement by all participants. 

Magasool Vaani is powered by Mobile Vaani (MV), a participatory IVRS-communication channel, which can be accessed 24x7 in  vernacular languages. It is also available through a voice based smart-phone app for those having data access. The voice-based nature of the system helps jump illiteracy barriers without the need for the users to own smartphones or have an internet connection – a simple missed call is all that it takes to access the system. 

We expect that the platform will be accessed by a large number of producers and consumers. So analyzing  voice records from millions of callers and matching the demands with the supplies in real time will become extremely inefficient with conventional manual approaches. The multiple languages and dialects will add to further complexity. To address these challenges, we aim to deploy AI/ML based solutions. Our tech-partner - Gram Vaani is developing speech2text based AI/ML tools to extract and organise relevant information from the voice records. It is also developing a cartographic model to extract geographic locations using speech recognition tools. These tools will enable an automated demand-supply matching over the Megasool Vaani platform. In addition, Gram Vaani is in the process of building automated Q&A for vernacular speakers, using speech recognition techniques. It will soon launch VoiceBot functions on the Mobile Vaani app too. We intend to use  these advanced tools for the benefit of our target communities. For instance, once we build FAQ banks and their appropriate responses over 3-4 crop cycles, we will be able to deploy automated Q&A tools. Once the participants record their queries, they will be able to receive relevant answers in real time, without delays and substantial human intervention.

We are committed to solving five problems in agriculture value chains (i) Low share of economic value at the primary producer level (ii) demand-supply mismatch and co-existence of  geographically proximate regions with scarcity and surplus (iii) poor transmission of quality and safety information along the chains - ie low transparency  (iv) long and fragmented value chains with several intermediaries only contributing to arbitrage between farm and fork (v) existing solutions are non intuitive to  weakest value-chain participants.

We have an IVRS (Mobile Vaani) based inclusive and participatory communication system for creating a digital Community Supported Agriculture (Oswald 2013) system. The system will ensure information symmetry for consumers and producers alike. 

 Primary producers’ revenue will grow 15% from direct consumer connect, incomes will become more stable from better visibility on demand and end consumers will get better prices. The food ecosystem will leave a smaller carbon and pesticide footprint from transparent shorter supply chains.  

Amidst COVID19 crisis, where social distancing is a new norm, we are successfully employing a model of Community-Supported-Agriculture (Oswald 2013) for better transmission of information over the value chain. We aim to expand our scale of operations and promote economic resilience to the poor population involved in farm-based sectors using the Mobile Vaani platform that allows more informed market participation for consumers and primary producers.

Our proposed system will consist of several fora of the following active players -

·         Primary producers, groups (FPOs, NGO members, informal communities)

·         Agricultural laborers

·         Primary processors for grains and pulses.

·         Traders and bulk procurers

·         Residents’ associations (including housing boards and slum clusters)

·         Transporters

Participants will interact through a simple voice based, moderated discussions on IVRS/smartphone app.  The voice-based nature of the system helps jump illiteracy barriers without the need for the users to own smartphones or have an internet connection – a simple missed call is all that it takes to access the system.

Farmer groups/farmers can place details of quantity, quality of their respective produce and price targets by simply recording their messages over phones. Consumers can provide demand and price expectations using the same channel. 

The Future Planet Capital Prize will be used to expand our reach to a few hundred thousand farmers and several million consumers across South Asia and develop and deploy suitable tech to achieve the scale.  Analyzing  voice records from millions of callers and matching the demands with the supplies in real time will become extremely inefficient with conventional manual approaches. The multiple languages and dialects of South Asia will add to further complexity. To address these challenges, we aim to deploy AI/ML based solutions. Our tech-partner - Gram Vaani is developing speech2text based AI/ML tools to extract and organize relevant information from the voice records. It is also developing a cartographic model to extract geographic locations using speech recognition tools. These tools will enable automated demand-supply matching over the digital voice platform. In addition, Gram Vaani is in the process of building automated Q&A for vernacular speakers, using speech recognition techniques. It will soon launch VoiceBot functions on the Mobile Vaani app too. We intend to use  these advanced tools for the benefit of our target communities. For instance, once we build FAQ banks and their appropriate responses over 3-4 crop cycles, we will be able to deploy automated Q&A tools. Once the participants record their queries, they will be able to receive relevant answers in real time, without delays and substantial human intervention.