[India] Farmer who grows data

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

[thanks to Ashish Kotamkar for posting the link on the Development 
Gateway]

Farmer who grows data
M. Suchitra

AS the farmers’ organisations mount their agitation against 
globalisation and as policy makers tax their brains for solving the 
crisis in the farm sector, one man has been trying almost single-
handedly for the last five years to collect information on various 
aspects of farming from diverse sources and explore a path for the 
state to emerge unscathed out of the WTO maze.

For 42-year- old A.V. Narayanaswami, a coffee planter in Wayanad, it 
has been a labour of love — to his vocation as a farmer and as a 
Keralite concerned about the woes of the state’s farm sector.
His huge data collection currently runs into over 1.5 lakh Web pages 
in more than 300 modules. The database covers the state’s farm 
potential, the new norms of production, packaging, marketing and 
certification taking effect at the global level, the major players in 
the area of multilateral negotiations, the kind of expert services 
that are and that could be available to farmers and the manner in 
which the state’s farming activities could be reoriented towards 
higher production.

Collecting and digitising such huge volumes of data is very 
strenuous. The work is divided within the family. Narayana Swamy, his 
wife Prabha and 15-year-old son, Vishnu, and 13-year-old daughter, 
Veda, learnt the computer programming and Web technologies and 
persistently improved their skills. They together collected over 
1,000 varieties of plants, identified and indexed them and then 
measured the light, temperature and the relative humidity four times 
a day. The voluminous data thus generated were digitised. A lot of 
information has been collected on calendar of operations, the maximum 
residue limits of chemical, phyto-sanitary standards, legal aspects 
of farming and commodity market derivatives etc.


source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/2002/20021202/login/main6.htm