There are some people who take the road less travelled with an objective of making a difference in others’ lives. MUSBA HASHMI brings you stories of entrepreneurs who aim to change the world with their innovative ideas

Lending a helping hand

Who doesn’t want a fancy job after graduating from an IIT or an IIM? Crore-plus packages with  high-profile companies and dream jobs fall into one’s lap easily there’s no reason to turn down these lucrative offers.

But, then there are some young guns who want to push their limits tread a path less travelled. They, instead of sitting in comfortable officers, decided to start their venture with the aim of revolutionalising a service. It is a new trend that has lead to economic and social growth by churning out new entrepreneurs by paying attention to sectors that were ignored and were in want of technological intervention.

A case in point is Ashish Mishra, who grew up in UP’s Shikohabad in a middle class family. For him, as for others, success meant to get a degree from good college and then say goodbye to the financial hardships that a middle class family faces. He studied hard and got admission in IIT-Kharagpur. But unlike others, who look for a cushiony job, Mishra had a different calling.

He came up with an app — TheKrishi — a social learning platform, empowering farmers with reliable information and utility tools which help them increase their income.

“The reason behind coming up with the app was that we wanted to take advantage of the growing Internet penetration to raise awareness and target the next 100 million users from rural India. We wanted to put farmers’ income on a faster growth trajectory. India has always been an agrarian economy and the idea was to help the farmers and contribute in the agriculture sector,” Mishra tells you and adds that solving problems was always on his cards.

The app uses various tools to help predict weather forecast, crop disease detection and price from the nearby markets. It bridges the information gap by bringing farmers and various other stakeholders on to a single platform. It also offers informative content to educate farmers about modern farming techniques, various crops diseases and their remedies. The content is provided in Hindi through videos and text. The plan is to bring the textual content in audio as well in order to make the app usable by any smartphone using farmer. The team is working on technologies to make the app available to every farmer in India who uses a mobile phone.

At a time when farmers are facing difficulties and want the Government’s help to increase their income, people like Mishra and his app are a saviour for all the stakeholders.

“I wanted to dedicate my time to solve the problems persisting in the country. This was my way of contributing to the solution by building a platform driving awareness and connecting various people in the agri-ecosystem. This would help farmers to a large extent,” he tells you.

It took Mishra nine-years of working in a healthcare sector before he gave shape to his idea. “My tech background helped me in coming up with idea. I did not have to face a lot of challenges yet to put together a solid team took time and effort. Finding the right team is important for any start-up since the team plays a key role in executing the vision. Initially, growing the platform with almost zero marketing was a hurdle. Although we were successful in driving organic installs, after running lots of experiments to drive growth without spending too much. The real challenges started after we have launched the start-up. There were days when nothing seemed to go right, but quitting was never an option. We were committed to this venture full-time in with an objective of helping the farmer increase their income. This thought kept us going,” he says.

Many such attempts fail to succeed or even take off owing to the pressure from peers and family for whom success means regular income from the word go. But Mishra is all praise for the support that he got from his friends and family who stood by him through thick and thin. “My family not only supported me, but also expressed deep-rooted belief in my idea. During difficult times, they were a huge source of inspiration. They motivated me to be self-directioned, consistent and keep up the hard work,” he says.

Mishra’s initiative is commendable keeping in mind the fact that the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported 5,650 farmer suicides in 2014 all over the country. India is an agrarian country with around 70 per cent of its people depending directly or indirectly upon agriculture. Farmer suicides account for 11.2 per cent of all suicides in India. As on 2015, more than three lakh farmers and farm workers have killed themselves in the country since 1995.

Let your imagination soar

An alumni of Johns Hopkins University, Ayushi Mishra along with her friends from IIT-Bombay, IIM-Indore and NIT-Rourkela decided to walk an extra mile and invent DronaMaps — an app that does 3D mapping using drones. The idea is to go a step ahead and challenge Google Maps.

“It was a chance encounter during a university project that we discovered the newly widespread drone technology. The combination of ubiquitous flying cameras available, suddenly opened a whole new world for the data hungry generation,” Mishra says.

This gold-rush of data-hogging machines happened right between 2012-15 very stealthily — and suddenly the world was full of drones and IoT devices. Mishra and team got down to exploring several uses of these drones, and discovered extracting terabyte scale data out of it in all 3-D at massive geographical scale.

“As an exploratory project — we decided to map Ayodhya and discovered more than 22 major verticals of data, all the way from continuous monitoring to street extractions using advanced AI algorithms, GIS feature sets an order of magnitude bigger than Google Maps database, water flow and pipelines to street lights, centimeter level analysis of heritage buildings and crowd flows, infrastructure details, vegetation spectrums and others, all from a single flight of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This dataset of an ancient town carefully captured over just a month with a single UAV opened up to potentially solving almost 80 per cent of the problems the city would face annually from logistics to security to administration while running bills less than the cost of painting the city in a single coat of paint,” Mishra tells you and says that the sheer density of visual data was breathtaking.

“It was like having recreated the real Ayodhya inch by inch, light years ahead of a movie set. The analytical potential was enormous in how many ways we can utilise this ultra dense data stream, when you have so much information that any problem can be solved on demand. We immediately got down to putting the best of talent in the technology, with help from our friends at Johns Hopkins University, which happens to be the founding place of 3D reconstructions,” Mishra says.

The impact of their work also enjoyed a Government support due to the massive scale of benefits at a fraction of cost, critical for a country like ours in how far and wide the impact becomes due to sheer resource demand by the population.

This was not the end of the road for Mishra. She along with her tech friends started collecting all the data, in a time-series, and calculated the changes over time. The results fascinated them and with the official incorporation of the company on October 5, 2016 they embraced the mission to 3D map this world in a continuous and uninterrupted manner and solve problems from sheer maps to enabling global autonomous cars to solving floods to detecting diseases in vegetations at entire cities at a time, in micro level.

“The mission is big enough to last our entire lifetimes and more. Inch by inch, city by city, country by country, we intend to expand our drone maps far and wide for continuously bringing the entire dynamics of this world on our fingertips. Our diverse training backgrounds across fields helped us bring domain expertise and quickly we expanded our teams to start mapping the country at a massive scale and with centimeter level detailing,” she says.

DronaMaps has worked for about two years now with different Government agencies and companies. With over 600 drone service providers in the ecosystem and spread throughout the country, they are at a point when they can launch a drone service at your doorstep anywhere in India within 24 hours.

There is much more to the app than what it seems. From potholes to flooding situation, it can detect it all.

“We hope to become the de facto mapping platform for the world for continuous data streams. We can detect potholes as they form and calculate the accurate amount of material needed to repair it. We can enable any robot or autonomous car which can use our point-cloud model as direct obstacle models to navigate. We can solve the flood situation in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru in a matter of months. We can obviate the calculation of property taxes city-wide, with a 10X improvement on satellite data and can detect diseases at the snap of a finger. We are doing most of this with our work with the Smart Cities and villages and are trying to scale it up internationally now. We’ve been awarded and recognised from the Asia Pacific Week in Berlin to NASSCOM to MP to CNBC. It is an overwhelming amount of work to rise up to solving these problems and running a company,” Mishra tells you who believes that within two years, the country will witness drones flying all over especially in tier-II cities.

Mishra has a piece of advice for the aspiring entrepreneurs who want to make it big and take a leap of faith.

“They say that a steady salary is one of the most addictive things in the world. Start-ups are a blind leap, you can prepare for it by being financially ready for the risk, create a skillsets that would be applicable, work with people you trust, find mentors in the space but nothing prepares you for the job except for the job itself. Starting something of your own is a little like falling in love,” Mishra says and explains that one has to nurture it, groom it and take care of it like your better half.

“Be prepared that within three months, every plan will take a U-turn, you may have to start from the scratch. The speed will be breakneck because the world is not in your control and you have to learn to react to it and confine to it. The tech industry is evolving at a fast pace. That means that things you didn’t think could exist in about two years time. People who work in start-ups don’t find this daunting.

“The reality is that if launching a company and changing the world is what you truly want, don’t wait for the right idea, because ideas evolve. No matter when you take it in your life, it’s an absolute blind jump and there is no other way than to just get registered and get started. Discipline, constant perseverance, and intolerable amounts of crazy are the key here,” Mishra says.

Using AI to help farmers is the way forward

Rashi Verma like Ashish Mishra is another brilliant mind who was moved with the plight of the farmers and the agriculture sector triggering the idea to establish a socio-economic business model to address the core issues of the country. To address such problems, Verma came up with the idea to integrate low cost innovative analytical and IoT-based solutions with agricultural techniques, thereby; overall farm yield can be improved, and farming decisions can be made through technology driven solutions.

She had a good job in the IT sector but her passion to be an entrepreneurship — AgSmartic Technologies — and the absence of appropriate technology in the agrarian sector motivated her to start a new venture. The other team members include Abhishek Sinha who is the CEO, and Saumak Mitra, the COO. Both are IIM-Calcutta alumni and like Verma were equally concerned about the state of affairs in agricultural sector. Their concern was more on the side of the loss of farm yield due to irrigation related problems, pests and other diseases.

Their start-up has developed a croplytics ecosystem, where on one side of the spectrum it has a soil sensor-based autonomous irrigation, while on the other side an image-based pest and disease detection system. Autonomous irrigation is a combination of wireless-based sensors devices (IoT), evapotranspiration models and machine-learning algorithm to arrive at accurate irrigation scheduling events to improve the crop yield. Detection of disease and pest infestation in the farmland is being done by image processing techniques using deep learning algorithms. The solution is expected to be launched commercially in the next two-three months.

The buck does not stop here for the trio who want to revolutionise the way farming is done in the country. “In addition to our proposed solution, we have also started working on AI-driven targeted spraying system whereby an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (drones) will be used for targeted pesticide spraying on site specific crops and or area by the help of edge computing methods,” Sinha explains and tells you that they would also like to bring solution like AI-based sowing recommender system that will send sowing advisory to farmers on optimum date to sow.

“We will also like to incorporate cutting edge deep learning based AI systems coupled with farm data, satellite images to help predict environmental factors, crop acreage and yield estimation,” Mitra says.

With the ideas and initiatives of such people, it is sure that the future of farming will go through a sea change and we might export our technology to the more developed nations.

“We are aiming to provide an integrated farm management system. At present, we are seeking support from the Government, institutes and programmes in the form of grants to commercialise our products and or paid pilots to help us check the efficacy of our products by providing an opportunity to conduct a pilot study for a period of at least one complete crop cycle,” Verma says.