Agriculture & Environment winners – 2016

Empowering Farmers, Agricultural Produce Marketing committee (APMC) and agents through a mobile app.

Launched in July 2015, Kisaan Suvidha is India’s first mobile application to bring Agricultural Produce Marketing committee (APMC), farmers and agents on one platform/online. The app benefits the farmers, commodity merchants and APMCs. Farmers can see the live auction of any commodity & APMC, price variations- maximum, minimum and average price of any commodity for any day/ month/ year. They no longer have to be physically present at APMC till the auction and weight measurement is done, through SMS facility provided to the app users, farmers receive auction price and total amount to collect from the agents. The agent can track his activity like commodities sold and bought by him, minimum, maximum & average price of all commodities. The agents can easily the see the details of Gate Pass, auctions, cess collection. The APMC agent can extract information about goods damages, total village wise commodity and revenue generates. On the same app, commodity merchants can analyse the ups and downs of all the APMC in the state, get information of total cess paid by him. Government bodies can view the total stock of any commodity at an APMC and review village/ taluk/ district wise production.

The app helps keep the ecosystem transparent as APMC agents can easily download excel files, view automated results, thus, controlling the black market and hoarding, saving time and keeping all records away from any kind of physical damage.

Till date, more than 7000 users have downloaded the mobile application from India.

Project Name: BREATHE
Organisation: IndiaSpend
Website: www.breathe.indiaspend.org
Email: karthik@indiaspend.org
Download App: NA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndiaSpend/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IndiaSpend

Measuring the air quality and pollution levels on low-cost innovative air quality monitors

IndiaSpend’s Breathe is India’s first independent network of air quality monitors. The air quality monitor is a low cost innovative technology that is simple and easy to install. The monitors measure the concentration of particulate matter, in addition to recording temperature and humidity of a certain location.

The Breathe project has opened up air monitoring to the general public as earlier it was limited to government and organisations, thus initiating a dialogue in every household about the extremely critical air pollution problem plaguing Indian cities.

When the Delhi government enforced the odd-even rule this January to control the air pollution, the Breathe project became an authoritative source for the city’s air quality data. In April 2016, Indiaspend collaborated with Twitter under the label #Breathe. On Twitter, whenever a user typed ‘#Breathe’ followed by the name of the area, they were notified about the air quality/ pollution level.

The Breathe air quality monitor is a simple electronic device which can be plugged to a power outlet, after installing a SIM card. The device then displays the air quality indicators on the display, and transmits the data to the servers. Real-time air quality index (AQI) values and calculates the particulate matter (PM 2.5 and PM 10), hourly average and 24 hour averages. Each device comes with equipped with a live data streaming capability supported by GPRS, which helps aggregate the air quality data on the Breathe servers. This data collected from various locations is available on the website for everyone to access. In this process, the Breathe project has become a repository of high quality and reliable data easily accessible to the common man. All data from air quality devices is stored and available for real-time comparison

The Breathe network currently has over 40 devices across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai, and is now expanding to smaller towns including Patna, Varanasi and Lucknow. By June 2016, the project envisions 15 cities with a total of 90100 devices.