Startup Mantra: SkillGati brings knowledge at farmers’ fingertips

Pune: Like every young man, Chaitanya Belhekar completed his engineering degree (Electronics and Communication) from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) Nagpur and got himself a job with Clairvolex in Gurgaon. “This gave me access to the latest agricultural technologies used in Europe. I saw how they used satellite imagery for remote sensing, farm management software for productivity, modern machinery, advanced agricultural practices, and climate-driven advisory. It was completely fascinating”. But more than that, it opened his eyes to the woeful condition of Indian farmers.

“My extended family are into farming and I had some idea of how they managed to grow crops. Europe has the best technology, agricultural decisions are based on scientific knowledge, AI, climate-driven decisions, and our Indian farmer? All they have is age-old knowledge, traditional practices, and heavy reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Every year we read about farmers committing suicide, and increasing unemployment in rural India and I felt that all this was majorly due to a huge skill gap in agriculture. And I thought to myself if farmers had access to the latest knowledge of agricultural technologies and practices, then things could change for them.”

Sharing best practices and the latest technology with farmers across India meant first gathering all this knowledge from varied places and making it easily accessible to the farmers. Chaitanya said, “There is an abundance of knowledge in institutes, colleges, and experts who have been working in the field for decades. But all this is too fragmented and not easily accessible.”

For instance, Sahyadri Farms is a farmer-producer organisation from Nashik. They are involved in growing grapes and have access to the latest farming techniques from global experts over Zoom or physical meets. Today, Sahyadri Farms is the largest grape exporter who earn ten times the other grape farmers in India. They could do this because they managed to get access to high-level practical knowledge to improve their earnings. Knowledge plays a vital role in agriculture.

But how to make this knowledge accessible to a small-holder farmer in a distant part of India? Chaitanya said, “The agricultural knowledge is available in silos. For example, Sahyadri Farms knows about grapes, there is Saguna Regenerative Technique (SRT) for regenerative farming, and various Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR) institutes and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) are working extensively on modern agri techniques, soil conservation, organic farming, biotech, and seed technology. But how can a small-holder farmer from Ballia district in Uttar Pradesh learn new-age organic farming practices developed by these experts to get better produce?”

With this in mind, Chaitanya and his friend Tejas Gaikwad together set up SkillGati in Dec 2021, with the aim of democratising knowledge in agriculture. The mission is to remove the barriers of resources, language, and literacy for every farmer and bring knowledge to their fingertips. For a year, we visited agricultural colleges, KVKs, Agricultural Technology Management Agencies (ATMAs), and agri-extension offices to understand what kind of information was available there and their operating model. We met agricultural students, farmers, rural youths, agri-officers, and NGO teams, and spoke to a lot of people. We found out that to gain any knowledge, a farmer might have to leave behind their work and travel to training camps that are mostly organised at the taluka levels.

This is inconvenient and expensive for farmers, moreover, there is no post-training support available to address their challenges. We also witnessed, with increasing digital penetration, that farmers have started using YouTube for accessing information, but it wasn’t fulfilling.

For example, a farmer in Chandrapur goes on YouTube and searches for goat farming. YouTube will throw up more than 2,000 videos. Most of them tell what is a goat farm or how much money can be earned from the business. But nowhere, they will get precise and complete knowledge on how to start and operate a goat farm. Many of them are even misleading, providing deceptive information to gain views.

YouTube provides repetitive, unstructured knowledge from agri-influencers that cannot be trusted, and there is no accountability. Trustworthy accessible knowledge? That is sadly missing.

So, the duo understood that they needed to develop verified, practical content and a platform to make it easily accessible to the farmers in different regional languages. Quite a huge task, “We first started with a blog course on mushroom farming. But soon realised that the farmer needed more. While the web is full of such videos, the problem is that they only provide info that is created largely by influencers wanting to increase views. Result? There is no real knowledge the farmer can get.

“So, we created a training programme with short content videos in collaboration with the best subject-matter expert. After consuming them, farmers had many queries. That’s why we started hosting periodic live sessions to address farmers’ queries and also created a WhatsApp community for the same. We also added tasks, quizzes, exams and personalised nudges to our training programmes to gamify the learning approach for the farmers. This way farmers would get trusted, and practical knowledge from the best experts anywhere in their required language. Starting with all regional languages was not really possible right now, so we are focussing on Hindi (to cater to the large Hindi belt), Marathi (we’re based out of Pune), and English. So far, we have created eight different online training programmes on animal husbandry and agri-business, namely; goat farming, vermicompost business, dairy farming, poultry farming, polyhouse nursery, bio floc fish farming, mushroom and lac farming (useful for farmers in Jharkhand and Orissa)”

The money story

Meeting users, experts, institutes, and government officers to understand the agri-ecosystem and its challenges, and then creating online programmes for their customers has cost them “more than ₹21 lakh. The average development cost for one programme is ₹60- ₹90 thousand.” And earning? “In the 10 months since we became operational, we have had more than 10,000 users on SkillGati and more than 2,500 paid customers (their programme costs anywhere between ₹500 to ₹2,500) amounting to a revenue of more than ₹13 lakh.” Which means breaking even and making profits is still some time away.

Chaitanya said, “Since we plan to have a basket of more than 90 online programmes on various topics in 22 different languages, we will need ₹1.5 crore funds. Like any other business, we need to market/advertise our product, and our mentors Ajay Bhagwat and Sudhanshu Srivastava, from TiE’s Nurture Program advised us that to scale only a digital approach won’t work, we need to have partner channels too. To that end, we are now working to tie up with e-seva kendras, government organisations, and cooperative banks. We found out that the rural youth go to banks to avail loan for their agri-businesses, but the banks are hesitant because they do not know how much these youth know to build a business and whether they can repay. So, we plan to partner with such banks where our training programme is offered to these youth and only if they complete and get 65% and above marks they will qualify for a loan. That way, the bank feels a bit more confident of lending them the money. Similarly, we plan to tie up with animal husbandry department, input companies, and cooperative societies to reach our target audience.”

Digital penetration in rural India is rapidly growing. With more than 442 million active internet users in rural India, it has surpassed urban India (378 million active users). This spells good news for SkillGati as it has a huge user base and growing day by day. With SkillGati, farmers can wake up to the huge possibilities their mobile phone holds.

“It’s still Day1 and the road ahead is long, but we remain committed to empowering those who feed India,” he said.