Technology for Rural Development

India is today among the countries leading the fourth industrial revolution. Now is an opportune moment for the country’s rural communities to close gaps that have persisted through the past. Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, Blockchain, and several other emerging technologies have the potential to help accelerate the transformation of rural communities.

Technology in agriculture

Agriculture, more than any other sector, has immense potential to accommodate these technologies and overcome yield barriers at a time when climate-related challenges threaten progress.

In places across India, Reliance Foundation is demonstrating the effective use of drones in farm operations. Finding new ways to assess crop health for insurance and other purposes is another strong area of focus.

While new technologies are beneficial and even crucial to addressing problems like labour shortage, their adoption is not without challenges given the small land-holding sizes of farms. Farmer collectives are helping overcome the barriers of scale.

Addressing climate-related challenges

Climate-related challenges are set to exacerbate and disproportionally affect rural communities. These challenges demand more resilience from rural households. Democratising information and knowledge are essential to enhancing resilience. The technologies of yesterday and today are being tied together to ensure data’s last-mile reach while efforts are on to extract more meaningful insights from data to tailor messages more effectively.

Tech-aided empowerment

Drawing from years of efforts of all stakeholders, Reliance Foundation has redoubled its commitment to skilling and empowering women through women-focused initiatives that encourage tech-aided micro-enterprise development at scale.

The current decade is fertile to achieve progress quickly. It is hoped that as a new self-reliant India emerges to take on global challenges on multiple fronts, people from the country’s rural communities will be those in the lead.

Community Capacity Enhancement

Reliance Foundation believes that development is truly sustainable only when communities are fully in-charge of their development. Towards this goal, Reliance Foundation works with rural communities to enhance their capacities for planning and taking up developmental activities.

Planning capacity is built when village-level development plans are prepared in a participatory manner with village-level institutions and all people in a community, especially women. In a similar manner, dedicated water use planning further cements efforts to sustain water-related gains and improves water governance.

Throughout the year, capacity enhancement initiatives largely aimed at strengthening livelihoods are taken up with collectives and individuals. These tailored efforts complement village development plans and usher holistic development in rural communities.

Improved nutrition for rural communities

Although India’s food production is powered by India’s villages, inadequate dietary diversity in rural households is a significant concern. Reliance Foundation takes a community-centric approach to improve dietary diversity. Raising awareness of the importance of a balanced diet is an indispensable part of this approach.

The approach begins with helping communities to increase their farm yields. Households are encouraged to diversify food production to include cereals like millets, fruits, vegetables, milk, legumes and animal sources of protein. Vegetable and fruit production are encouraged through backyard kitchen gardens. Several thousand such gardens have been established by rural communities across India at homes, schools and Anganwadis.

Water is linked closely to nutrition, which is why Reliance Foundation’s efforts to conserve water are also aimed at ensuring drinkable water is provided as well as water for agriculture.

Besides enhancing source inflows through recharge wells and rainwater harvesting, Reliance Foundation focuses on improving access to clean drinking water by supporting the development of storage and distribution infrastructure. This includes co-development of piped water supply systems and community-owned and constructed water storage tanks, through various participatory efforts.

Empowering Women in Rural Communities

Integral to India’s rural workforce, women have a key role to play in various on farm and off-farm activities. Reliance Foundation’s Rural Transformation programme is centred around the role of women in enhancing resilience and raising household incomes through diversification through its DRIWE and information services initiatives.

By leveraging the collective power of self-help groups, Reliance Foundation supports women in agriculture and encourages alternative livelihoods through skill and capacity development. Women are supported in establishing businesses, building brands and developing leadership capacity. The aim is to pave their participation in society and local governance and give them a greater say in the development of their communities.

Reliance Foundation has worked with self-help groups in value chains of crops, dairy, arts and handicrafts.

In 2023, the Reliance Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched an initiative to empower one million women entrepreneurs in several states in India, by strengthening women collectives, testing and scaling innovations and establishing replicable models of entrepreneurship with women-led enterprises. This initiative has been developed with and will be delivered through partnerships with the State Rural Livelihood Missions, as well as with the support of several implementation partners. Over the next three years, this initiative will support and engage women in farm and non-farm income-generating activities, to help them achieve an annual income of at least Rs. 1 lakh as envisioned by the Government Of India’s Ministry of Rural Development.

Enhancing Farming Incomes

Reliance Foundation enables rural households to enhance their incomes through farming, fishing, livestock, poultry and other means of livelihoods with approaches including:

• • Equipping communities with knowledge of improved practises and support schemes

• • Strengthening collectives

• • Disseminating new skills, ways to reduce input costs, support in acquiring improved material/inputs/tools

• • Strengthening market linkages

• • Information leverage for higher income

These are part of the Integrated Value Chain Development (IVCD) initiative.

Lowering costs, increasing yields

To help increase farm incomes, Reliance Foundation works with farmers on the input side to lower costs and increase yields. Cost reduction efforts involve adopting efficient resource management practises and sustainable farming techniques that reduce dependence on supplemental inputs.

Farmers are also supported in choosing crops that are best suited to their agro-ecology. Through partnerships with agriculture research institutes, improved seed varieties are provided to farmers. By obtaining necessary information from the Reliance Foundation during the entire duration of the crop cycle, farmers are able to confidently take timely decisions related to field operations.

On the output side, farmers are supported in post-harvest primary or secondary processing, where there is scope, through farmer collectives. These collectives, either mentored or supported by Reliance Foundation, procure produce from the farm-gate, help farmers utilize technologies and overcome labour shortage, provide grading or sorting services, process the produce and ensure fair compensation to their member farmers.

Through these collectives, farmers also get an opportunity to explore new markets for their produce. They are made aware of government social security schemes and supported in availing of them.

Adequate water and healthy soils are key ingredients to good yields. Farmers are supported in getting their soils tested and encouraged to enhance soil health through cost-effective and environmentally sustainable initiatives. Water availability for agriculture is improved by community and individual efforts to harvest rainwater and improve groundwater recharge. Tailored water harvesting plans for each village help increase water harvesting capacity and ensure availability of soil moisture during rabi and summer seasons.

So far, more than 1,413 lakh cubic metres of water harvesting capacity has been created across India. This has helped farmers in cropping more than once during the year and increase their earnings.

Raising poultry, livestock and fishing incomes

Reliance Foundation supports households in rearing high-yielding breeds of livestock and poultry. Best practises in livestock rearing and feed management are shared and capacity to adopt these practises is built. After initial handholding, households are supported in scaling up their activities.

Information about weather and disease alerts, and expert prescriptions for vaccination and treatment provided at free livestock camps help households mitigate livestock related losses.

For marine fisherpersons, information about potential fishing zones helps increase the chances of a good catch in the ocean. PFZ information also leads fisherpersons safely and quickly to areas where fish is available. By reducing the fuel expended, this information contributes to lowering the environmental footprint of fisherfolk.

Promoting non-farm livelihoods

Given the inherent risks in farming and allied activities, Reliance Foundation encourages households to take up non-farm activities alongside farming. Landless and tenant farming households as well as farm labourers are also supported in diversifying their incomes.

These activities are entrepreneurial in nature. Tailoring, groceries, confectionary, printing and data entry, other vending and service enterprises are some of avenues for alternate livelihoods. By leveraging government grant and loan schemes through self-help groups, rural households can start, sustain and scale up alternate livelihood activities.

Securing Livelihoods by Improving Climate Resilience

A changing climate will significantly affect agricultural and related livelihoods. The Government of India projects that rice yields under rain-fed and irrigated conditions could fall by as much as 20% and 3.5%, respectively, by 2050 in the absence of interventions. For wheat, a 19.3% reduction is projected.

Reliance Foundation takes a multipronged approach with rural communities to help smallholder farm households enhance their resilience to pests, diseases and inter-seasonal climate uncertainties while improving their capacity to adapt to long-term climate related changes through its Climate Resilience for Sustainable Development (CR4SD) initiative.

Adopting resilient crop varieties

Farm households with small landholdings cultivating conventional varieties of a single crop are more vulnerable to climate shocks than households that cultivate resilient varieties. Reliance Foundation encourages farmers to cultivate resilient varieties with traits like a short maturity cycle, heat, drought or salinity tolerance, and pest and disease resilience.

Diversifying crop production

Intensive monocropping renders farmers more vulnerable to climate shocks including inter-seasonal dry spells, pests and diseases. To help farmers shift from monocropping, farmers are introduced to crop rotation with pulses, oilseeds and millets along with the incorporation of horticulture and floriculture for enhanced incomes.

Better natural resources management

Reliance Foundation works with rural communities to enhance crop yields by supporting communities in the sustainable use of land and water. Landscape approaches like contour bunding, land levelling and terracing are advocated alongside practices like raised bed cultivation that can sustain or improve crop yields while reducing erosion.

Partnering with entire villages, Reliance Foundation encourages strengthening the water harvesting capacity within communities by supporting the creation of new water harvesting structures and revitalising existing structures. Farmers are supported in adopting efficient irrigation practises like sprinkler and drip irrigation to encourage sustainable water use.

Rural diversification

A household’s resilience is higher when sources of income are diverse. To enhance resilience to log-term climate related challenges, households are supported in diversifying into agri-allied income generating activities like livestock rearing, poultry, fishing and non-farm, skill-based microentrepreneurial activities.

Households are supported in acquiring resilient and market-preferred breeds of livestock and poultry. Through regular capacity enhancement programmes, scientifically-proven practises are shared to help communities in caring for their livestock. Livestock medical camps are regularly organised to help households get timely veterinary treatment. The camps assume greater importance during and after extreme weather events.

Information services for farmers

Smallholder farming communities are supported with information throughout a crop cycle. Weather forecasts and advisories that help inform decisions regarding the times of sowing, intercultural operations, pest and disease management and harvest. Besides ensuring desired yields, the information helps to mitigate the fallout from climate shocks.

Reliance Foundation supports marine fishing communities by providing fishers crucial ocean state forecast information and related advisories. This helps fisherpersons navigate the ocean in a safe and informed manner, lowering risk to their lives and livelihoods. Weather information also helps both marine and inland fisherfolk to safeguard their equipment, ponds and fish during extreme events like cyclones and floods.