Want to eat fresh fruit procured directly from farmers? Just a phone call or email to KisanRajaFRESH will get them delivered to your home or office in Bangalore, and usually at less than prevailing market rates.
The product-rate list on www.kisanraja.in indicates that the winter fruit we traditionally eat are all currently available – apple, banana, chikoo, custard apple, grapes, guava, kinnow, muskmelon, orange, papaya, pear, pineapple, pomegranate, strawberry, sweet lime, watermelon. You can order on the phone by calling Manjunath 9900866966 or email your order to fresh@kisanraja.com. The website is being developed and online ordering would be possible once it is ready.
KisanRajaFRESH is an initiative by Vijay Bhaskar Reddy Dinnepu, whose vision is “To make agriculture a farmer-friendly occupation with an ultimate objective of bringing food security”. Currently servicing the Marathahalli – Outer Ring Road area, Vijay hopes to expand to other parts of Bangalore soon.
Vijay, 37, comes from an agricultural family and is familiar with what farmers experience in the fields, from tilling the fields right to getting their produce into the market for sale. KisanRajaFRESH, he feels, will help both the cultivator of the fruit and its end consumer – the consumer will pay less than he presently does and despite this, the farmer will earn more.
KisanRajaFRESH is a natural extension of Vijay’s “KisanRaja” line of products. After studying Chemical Engineering in Tiupati and doing his post-graduation in Computer Science at IIT Madras, Vijay worked at Intel and Cisco for a few years before deciding to work for himself to give back to his roots, agriculture. In 2010, he started Vinfinet Technologies Pvt. Ltd, with a view to help in solving problems faced by his family and other farmers. I had the pleasure of getting to know Vijay during the finals of Season 1 of Spark the Rise. “If technology cannot solve the problems of 72% of the population, of what use is it?” says Vijay.
Erratic water supply and erratic power supply were the two very visible problems – and these were related. Without power it was difficult to get water into the fields and without water the crops couldn’t grow well, affecting productivity. Most often, farmers would need to go out into the fields at odd hours to switch on the motor pumps to get water into the fields. After doing some research on available and possible solutions, Vijay and his team developed KisanRaja, a GSM-based mobile motor controller, which allows farmers to control the agricultural motor pumps using their mobiles or landlines from the comforts of their homes or anywhere else. It is an easy to use, economical communication device, which can be fitted to all the existing motor starters and used with mobiles or landlines of any operator. By just dialing a number, the farmer can switch on his motor pump!
KisanRaja has gone through a few iterations and variations to serve different farming needs. Depending on the model, the price varies Rs 3,500 to Rs 7,500. With more than a hundred dealers and distributors in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, KisanRaja has touched more than 1600 farmers. Over the last couple of years it has been recognised in various socio-technological forums as one of the most useful farming innovations to improve agricultural productivity, the most recent ones being Mahindra’s Spark the Rise and Sankalp 2012.
Apart from the mobile motor controller, the company is developing other agri-solutions, all towards its mission to “Shape the future of farming in economies using sustainable technologies and make agriculture a safe and profitable occupation”. KisanRajaFRESH is one of these!
More information on KisanRaja can be found here.
Pics courtesy: Vijay
Citizen Matters article here.
arathimy 
I could not resist commenting. Very well written!
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