\u201cWhat is happening,” he says, \u201cis that the joint family did not live.”<\/p>\n
He isn\u2019t romanticising it. He\u2019s describing a practical advantage the old arrangement had: when his grandfather\u2019s house held 30 people, farm decisions didn\u2019t require an appointment with an officer or a visit to a university. Somebody in the house had seen the crop up close. Somebody had tried a method last season. Advice travelled through courtyards and meals, through evenings long enough for one farmer to notice what another farmer had done.<\/p>\n
His own day is split the way small farming days often are\u2014across crops and animals, across work that can\u2019t be postponed. Sugarcane is the main crop. He intercrops\u2014chickpea, soybean, wheat. He keeps cattle. Dairy runs through the day: fodder, milk, the fixed chores that don\u2019t wait for a convenient time to go and meet an officer or catch a scientist at a training.<\/p>\n
The universities and research stations still exist. So do the agriculture staff. Asawa\u2019s complaint is simpler: \u201cWhen we work in our fields, we can\u2019t coordinate with them that much.”<\/p>\n
So farmers fall back on whoever is closest and fastest: the Krushi Seva Kendra, the local input shop that sells seed, fertiliser and pesticide, and, just as often, sells the advice that comes with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever they give us, we have to use it,” Asawa says.<\/p>\n
Two months earlier, he noticed a problem in his crop\u2014small red dots. Instead of the old routine of going to the shop, Asawa this time checked the MahaVISTAAR app, one that provides agricultural information, built by the department of agriculture, government of Maharashtra. It\u2019s a way to get university-backed advice right away.<\/p>\n
The app gave a mixing instruction\u2014how much chemical to dissolve in water before you spray\u2014\u201c25 grams per 10 litres”. The Krushi Seva Kendra advised 50 grams per 10 litres.<\/p>\n
He tried the lower dose. It worked. \u201cI saved at least \u20b9<\/span>2,000 per acre,” he says.<\/p>\n Asawa lingers less on the money than on the source. \u201cThis research is coming from the university,” he says. \u201cThere is full trust. And there is no marketing for this.”<\/p>\n What\u2019s being tested\u2014here, and across the state line into Gujarat\u2014is who gets to answer first, and what a farmer can trust when they\u2019re making a decision mid-day. If the quickest answer is the shop counter, the advice arrives with a bill. If the quickest answer is a helpline or an app backed by universities and cooperatives, the bet is that speed doesn\u2019t have to mean salesmanship.<\/p>\n When officers in Sangamner talk about \u201cuniversity-backed,” they\u2019re not using it as a prestige word. They mean something more literal: the app isn\u2019t scraping answers off the open internet; it\u2019s carrying, in phone form, the paper advisories that already exist in Maharashtra.<\/p>\n \u201cThe complete information in MahaVISTAAR hasn\u2019t been put on the internet,” Akshay Mahadev Gosavi, an agriculture officer in the Sangamner subdivision, tells me. It\u2019s pulled from research institutions\u2014especially the agricultural universities\u2014and entered into the system.<\/p>\n At the Sangamner agriculture office, the officer says a big part of the job now is simply getting farmers onto that pipeline\u2014registration, first questions, first proof that the answer matches the field.<\/p>\n In the district offices, the reason for building the app is blunt. Farming is less predictable now; field staff can\u2019t be everywhere. So the app tries to carry the \u201cpackage of practices”\u2014from sowing to marketing\u2014into a phone: pest guidance with dosage, mandi prices, scheme access, and directories for things like equipment and storage so farmers aren\u2019t forced into distressed sales. The database keeps getting updated as farmers keep asking questions.<\/p>\n In Nashik, Ravindra Mane, an officer in the district agriculture setup, described the app as one integrated place to access agricultural resources.<\/p>\n The build, he says, is still unfinished\u2014\u201c20 to 30%” done, backend work ongoing.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tView Full Image<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div> Mane kept circling back to one detail\u2014the source line. \u201cThe information that is being sent to you, its source is also given,” he says, as if the whole app depended on that one discipline. In his telling, the chatbot isn\u2019t magic; it\u2019s filing. He describes the chatbot\u2019s knowledge base as a stitched-together file of what the state already treats as authoritative: university advisories, documents from the Maharashtra animal-husbandry department, and material from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the Krishi Vigyan Kendras.<\/p>\n Farmers don\u2019t need a bibliography, he suggests. They need to know whether an answer came from a university or a department circular\u2014before they risk money, crops, and health on it.<\/p>\n Mane\u2019s sharpest contrast was about timing. Earlier, he says, a university advisory might reach the department in a week, get typed into Krishi Samachar, and by the time it landed, \u201cthe pest had already spread.” Now, the system can push a weather-change or pest-risk notification inside 24 hours\u2014fast enough to matter in the way Asawa\u2019s \u201c25 grams” mattered.<\/p>\n To get it onto phones, he describes the rollout like a drive: about 60 student volunteers in green T\u2011shirts; QR codes printed on the back so farmers could download the app on the spot; \u201cJoin our digital movement” printed on the front; and schoolchildren recruited as the district\u2019s best messengers because, as he says with a shrug, \u201cthese children can do anything on Android.”<\/p>\n Out of roughly 735,000 farmers in Nashik, around 186,000 had registered and around 66,000 had completed registration as farmers. The biggest obstacle, he admits, was still connectivity: in tribal belts like Surgana, there were 27 villages with no network coverage at all, and the team was planning an offline mode that would sync once a phone reached coverage again.<\/p>\n In Nashik district, a gathering of farmers is being called an \u201cAI summit.” Nobody arrives talking about algorithms. They arrive talking about price.<\/p>\n \u201cThe tomato that went for \u20b9<\/span>50 a kilo today,” says Dattu Dhage, \u201csometimes will go for \u20b9<\/span>10, sometimes \u20b9<\/span>100.”<\/p>\n He lists what grows around them\u2014tomato, brinjal, fenugreek, cauliflower, karela, rice, wheat, gram. The diversity is pride, but it\u2019s also pressure. It means you are always making decisions across crops, across markets, across risk.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tView Full Image<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div> The MahaVISTAAR app is present in the meeting\u2014its standard operating procedures (SOPs), its chatbot, its promise of neutral information in a landscape where private apps often lead you toward a product. But the argument in here isn\u2019t about the idea. It\u2019s about whether the numbers match the day.<\/p>\n Rajkumar, a farmer from Nashik, tells me he first learned about the app at a Gram Panchayat workshop. Shailesh Dhage, who grows tomato and soybean, says he\u2019s used its SOPs and chatbot for questions as varied as wheat, fodder grass, and insect disease\u2014proof, in miniature, of what farmers mean when they say they want answers fast.<\/p>\n Tukaram Gamne, who says he\u2019s been watching the app, puts it in one line: \u201cThe app says that the market of soybean is still \u20b9<\/span>45 per kg, but the actual market price is \u20b9<\/span>53.” The app, he complains, was showing old data.<\/p>\n What he wants is practical: if prices are moving this fast, show me something I can act on. Where nearby can I get a better rate that\u2019s worth the drive? Because the moment you make it about travel, fuel, and time, \u201cinformation” becomes a profit-and-loss decision.<\/p>\n Parimal Singh is the project director of PoCRA, the state\u2019s climate-resilience agriculture programme, formally the Nanaji Deshmukh Krishi Sanjivani Project. His answer to this isn\u2019t \u201ctrade on the platform.” He\u2019s cautious about the state becoming an active player in a private market. But he does want the app to become a decision-support tool: if you\u2019re showing prices across a 30-kilometre periphery, you should show a travel or logistics-cost calculator alongside it. You should show a simple price history graph, so a farmer can see whether the number is a one-day spike or a trend. You should help buyers and sellers find each other\u2014discovery\u2014without pretending the government can guarantee the deal.<\/p>\n Singh puts the ambition in the language of someone building public infrastructure: move from \u201cdisaggregated, fractured” access to information to \u201ca single place, validated, credible.”<\/p>\n In our conversation, he keeps returning to the same constraints: guardrails, consent, sources. One rule, he says, is that the system shouldn\u2019t behave like a farmer with an open browser\u2014if the answer isn\u2019t inside, it can\u2019t just \u201cdig anywhere” on the World Wide Web.<\/p>\n His ambition for the app is also more granular than \u201cone message fits all.” With consent, he wants it to know what kind of farmer you are, and eventually move toward the parcel level\u2014so advisories can be tailored to the crop, the plot, and the person: a woman farmer who is also a dairy farmer; a krishi tai acting as an extension node; someone in a self-help group whose constraints differ from someone outside it.<\/p>\n He also describes a development discipline that\u2019s easy to miss when you only see the app icon. They launched around 21 May, and from May through September focused on stabilizing\u2014\u201clet us weed out mistakes”\u2014because the world of farm questions is so wide that the early job is error control, with humans in the loop. By the time we spoke, Singh says the app had around 25,00,000 downloads, and the chatbot had about 4,50,000 unique users\u2014eight to ten thousand of them asking questions daily.<\/p>\n When he talks about what comes next, he stops talking about the screen and starts talking about a phone call. Telephony, he says, is already plugged in; the hard part is making it survive the \u201cnoisy world.” But he calls it the coming \u201cgame changer”: both push calls (the system calling farmers) and two-way calls (farmers calling in). The numbers he uses are program-scale: if the system can call 15 million farmers over seven days, he expects 50,00,000 to respond. That kind of response creates feedback loops\u2014farmers correcting the system, the system learning what farmers actually ask\u2014that don\u2019t exist when everything depends on an office visit.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are working with countries and early adopter states in India (Maharashtra is one example) to create sovereign, safe, accountable AI applications for people at scale,” said Jagadish Babu, the chief operating officer of EkStep. The Bengaluru-based nonprofit has partnered with the Union agriculture ministry on Project VISTAAR, the DPI network designed to plug into AgriStack and run AI chatbots, and it supports AI4Bharat\u2019s Indian-language speech work.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, around the meeting, other frictions show up. Language changes fast here. In five kilometres, the Marathi shifts. Farmers say some Marathi dialects still isn\u2019t fully supported\u2014one of those quiet constraints that can kill adoption without anyone noticing.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the bureaucratic fatigue that makes farmers cynical about anything \u201cdigital” in the first place. A drip-shop owner, Anil Gangurde, talks about loan applications that still send people to cyber-caf\u00e9s and Aadhaar centres. Another farmer, Mayur Jaiwantagam, talks about what\u2019s useful: cold-storage listings, phone numbers, contact details\u2014things that let small farmers call directly instead of begging favours.<\/p>\n Leaving Maharashtra, the \u201capp story” stayed in my head as a handful of scenes: Asawa measuring grams into 10 litres of water because his phone told him to; farmers in Nasik arguing over a soybean rate that doesn\u2019t match the day; children who could do anything on Android, and are the app\u2019 s ambassadors.<\/p>\n Across the border in Gujarat, near Anand, the product isn\u2019t crop. It\u2019s milk. And the unit of urgency isn\u2019t a market day. It\u2019s the time between an animal falling sick and help arriving.<\/p>\n At the milk collection centre in Mujkuva village, the work starts with cleaning. \u201cCome on, clean it up,” one woman tells another. \u201cLet it dry.”<\/p>\n The machine gets calibrated. Milk arrives in cans\u2014poured, pooled, cooled\u2014into a bulk cooler. A local man at the centre describes the farms that feed it: mostly small holdings, four or five animals, run by family members. When something goes wrong, it falls on the people already doing everything.<\/p>\n At this centre, he says, the mix is mostly buffalo milk\u2014about 70%\u2014with cows making up the rest.<\/p>\n When an animal falls sick, the old arrangement is simple and slow. You call the doctor, pay \u20b9<\/span>150, and then wait\u2014two hours, sometimes four\u2014for the vet to arrive.<\/p>\n So when a phone is put on speaker for a pilot helpline, nobody debates whether this counts as \u201cAI.” Someone even makes the local joke: \u201cAI” already means something here\u2014artificial insemination. This is a different kind of AI. The question, in the room, is narrower: can it help treat the animal before the doctor arrives?<\/p>\n A Gujarati voice comes on. \u201cMu Sarlaben, Amul AI”.<\/p>\n Sarlaben is an AI-powered digital assistant designed for dairy farmers.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tView Full Image<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div> The assistant begins the way a caretaker would: cow or buffalo? Then the guidance comes fast and ordinary: keep the stall dry; clear old dung and mud; for a calf the first three days of colostrum matter; start mineral mix\u201420 to 25 grams\u2014and build from there.<\/p>\n The women standing closest to the phone introduce themselves the way livestock farmers do\u2014by counting animals. Bhargavi, from Mujkuva, tells me her family keeps around 20 cows. Jagruti says she has 10. Neela counts one cow and five buffaloes.<\/p>\n Bhargavi explains what she liked about the call in the language of treatment, not technology. You ask a question, she says, and the voice tells you what medicine to use and what to do; you can get it and apply it to the animal.<\/p>\n For \u201csmall small” problems, they tell me, families already try what they have\u2014home remedies, organic medicines\u2014because calling the doctor for everything is its own burden.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the doctor does not come immediately,” Bhargavi says, \u201cthen we will talk to the nurse.”<\/p>\n When I ask how they will know if advice is wrong, the answer is unromantic: you find out after you try it. But calling the doctor again and again for small things is also a problem.<\/p>\n Neela tells me her first call \u201cfelt good.” She says the voice understood what she asked. They\u2019re also blunt about what still doesn\u2019t work. The system doesn\u2019t yet \u201cknow” them when they speak\u2014not their herd size, not their record. Sometimes, they say, the SMS goes to the wrong number\u2014someone else\u2019s phone, often a male relative\u2019s. One woman mentions another farmer\u2019s name appearing alongside her number, like the record has been tied to the wrong person.<\/p>\n Later, when Ajay Sheth, Amul\u2019s chief technology officer, walks me through the build, he starts where cooperatives always start: with the member.<\/p>\n \u201cOur journey to AI started last month when our MD met Prime Minister Modi,” he says. The instruction was to build something for milk producer members, especially women, and to do it fast. \u201cWithin four weeks we are ready to offer.”<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tView Full Image<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div> He keeps returning to the same idea: Amul already had a foundation\u2014farmer apps, cattle records, decades of circulars and protocols\u2014but much of it stayed inside offices. The project, as he describes it, is to unlock that knowledge and make it reachable by app and by a phone call, even for feature-phone users.<\/p>\n Jayen Mehta, Amul\u2019s managing director, told me he\u2019d tested the system the way a Gujarati businessman tests anything new: by trying to break it with real voices. He describes asking someone with a thick Gujarati accent to speak, then holding his breath to see if it would catch. \u201cI was scared,” he says.<\/p>\n Mehta says he\u2019d also been \u201cshockingly surprised” when farmers began buying and selling cattle through Amul\u2019s app almost as soon as the option existed. And in the field he noticed another quiet shift: women who realise their accounts are linked to a male relative\u2019s number start saying they\u2019ll change it\u2014put my number. Standing in Mujkuva, listening to women complain about missing SMSes, you can see exactly why that matters.<\/p>\n Back at the milk collection centre, the questions that will decide whether any of this lasts are still basic and non-negotiable: does the number stay stable, do messages go to the right person, does the voice hold up in real noise, does the advice still make sense the next time someone\u2019s animal is sick and the doctor is two hours away.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhat is happening,” he says, \u201cis that the joint family did not live.” He isn\u2019t romanticising it. He\u2019s describing a practical advantage the old arrangement had: when his grandfather\u2019s house held 30 people, farm decisions didn\u2019t require an appointment with an officer or a visit to a university. Somebody in the house had seen the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[45666,25465,45671,13879,45669,45670,263,262,8335,260,45667,259,258,45672,36702,265,202,42525,18109,261,45668,264],"class_list":["post-419898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-metaverse","tag-agri-tech-india","tag-ai-in-agriculture","tag-ai-pilot","tag-ai-summit","tag-amul","tag-amul-sarlaben","tag-axie-infinity","tag-axs","tag-chatbots","tag-decentraland","tag-digital-farming-india","tag-facebook","tag-game","tag-jayen-mehta","tag-maharashtra","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-nft","tag-precision-agriculture","tag-prime-minister-modi","tag-sandbox","tag-smart-farming","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":419905,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419898\/revisions\/419905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The source line<\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe \u2018AI summit\u2019<\/h2>\n
![\"Farmers](\"https:\/\/www.livemint.com\/lm-img\/img\/2026\/02\/16\/600x338\/AI_summit_1771244345740_1771244375230.jpeg\" "\\"Farmers")
\n\t\t\t\t <\/source><\/picture>\n
\n\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe frictions<\/h2>\n
\u2018Mu Sarlaben\u2019<\/h2>\n
![\"Women](\"https:\/\/www.livemint.com\/lm-img\/img\/2026\/02\/16\/600x338\/Women_dairy_farmers_1771244466730_1771244501700.jpeg\" "\\"Women")
\n\t\t\t\t <\/source><\/picture>\n
\n\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n![\"Ajay](\"https:\/\/www.livemint.com\/lm-img\/img\/2026\/02\/16\/600x338\/Amul_1_1771244536445_1771244556974.jpg\" "\\"Ajay")
\n\t\t\t\t <\/source><\/picture>\n
\n\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n