Hyderabadi develops best app in Asia

Raghu Kanchustambham, who graduated from IIT-Guwahati in 2000, represented India in the ‘Digital Winner Conference 2014’ in Oslo earlier this month. He developed an app to help tribal farmers track their yield estimate, actual crop produced, and the amount they are supposed to receive. The app is currently being used by 12,000 farmers from 650 villages in AP and has been adjudged ‘The Best App in Asia’

Raghu Kanchustambham’s mobile app Livelihood 360 (L360) has been judged the ‘Best app in Asia’ at the Digital Winner Conference 2014 held in Oslo, Norway, earlier this month.The app is useful for farmers as it enables them to collect money on the spot from truck drivers who transport the farmer’s stock.

“For this,” Raghu explains, “there are coffee and tobacco farmers who yield the produce and send it to the market for sale but they don’t get the money instantly. Instead they get the money once the truck driver collects the produce and takes it to headquarters. From there on the farmer has to visit the headquarters and claim his money and this procedure takes a month’s time.”

But with the help of this app the money can be collected on spot from the driver. This app can work online and offline. There is a unique code given to the farmer once the farmer mentions his code to the driver. He then punches that code in this app. The details of every farmer are stored on the server and there is a database maintained of nearly 12,000 farmers from 650 villages across Araku Valley region. Once the driver inputs the code, he gets the details of the farmer and he pays the money to him on the spot.

The main advantage of this app is that the time consumption has been reduced and it has really benefitted the farmers in terms of the produce because if the coffee beans are dried up they lose its flavour. There were a lot of challenges faced by Raghu initially because it was not an easy task.

“I could not believe this would have been possible because there was no such work done earlier and it seemed almost impossible. But it’s a success today and the credit goes to the Nandi foundation. It’s an NGO which has done a lot of groundwork and research about farmers and also in educating the drivers as most of them haven’t even completed schooling. They have worked hard in making this app a success. When they approached the farmers and truck drivers with this idea, they were overwhelmed and they went out of their way to help us,” explained Raghu.

Raghu got the honours at the Telenor Digital Winners Conference at Oslo earlier this month. The event is a global platform where young entrepreneurs are invited to participate and present their application or start up ideas.

Raghu notes that this app also works on ordinary phones with an internet connection. “The app calculates the expected produce and the yield estimate, and it took almost 2 to 3 months for the roll out and it was done it 3 phases,” he said.