Join us for our next e-Agriculture webinar: How mobile phones changed water irrigation in India

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How Mobile Phones changed water irrigation in India - Remote Control of Water Pumps with Mobile Phones - the experience of Nano Ganesh

When: 30^th of June – 3.30 PM CEST – 7PM IST

Topic: Nano Ganesh is a mobile-based remote controller for water pumps. This innovation features an electronic hardware based remote control system, operated by a mobile phone with mobile​signal connectivity at both ends. It serves as an interface between the high voltage starters of the waterpumps and the low voltage GSM modules, enabling farmers to switch the water pump on and off and to check the availability of power. It also enables farmers to check the water levels in the storage tank or well. It is a simple and low-cost solution that helps farmers avoid long distance travels to the hazardous distant pump sites and allows him to be at home during odd hours. It also avoids the farmers need to remain on site for hours to be able to switch it off again when irrigation is completed.

Remote control for irrigation is a game changer for smallholder farmers to help them overcome challenges like erratic power, irregular water supply, dangerous travel as well as waste of energy resources, water and time. Introduced in 2003-4, Nano Ganesh now has over 60 000 installations in India impacting 480K rural population, and the number is still growing.

Santosh Ostwal, who is an electrical engineer, innovator and entrepreneur at the origin of the development of Nano Ganesh will share his 25 years journey of rural ICT experience during the webinar looking at the challenges he faced in the development of the solution and its implementation and how to overcome them.

The presentation will be followed by a Q&A with the speaker.

In 2009, Nano Ganesh was awarded as a Grand Winner in the Nokia Calling All Innovators Contest in Barcelona, Spain in emerging market category. Nano Ganesh was also among the nominees of the GSMA Awards in Mobile World Congress for Social & Economic Applications of Mobile Phone Category in 2010. Santosh Ostwal, Founder of Nano Ganesh was honored as The Tech Award Laureate in The Economic Development Category by The Tech Museum, Silicon Valley, CA, USA in 2011.

Duration: 1 hour

Speaker:

Santosh Ostwal is CEO & Founder Director of Ossian Agro Automation Pvt. Ltd from India who is born and brought up in farmer’s family. He started with the development of e-Irrigation devices  in 1991 and formally founded the company in 1996 when he had couple of low cost simple electronics devices to offer to the farmers for solving the problems in irrigation and has been improving it ever since. He concluded in 1998 that an ICT like remote control for the water pumps is the crucial need of the majority of the farmers. Since then, he went through different versions of remote controllers from 100 feet range to unlimited range Nano Ganesh.

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