About Dvara E-Registry
Dvara E-Registry is an SBU of Dvara Trust that works with the vision to be the financial inclusion and productivity enabling platform for all stakeholders in the agricultural value chain. This is achieved by providing farm-level information, analytics and actionable insights by harnessing the transformative power of artificial intelligence, remote sensing and emerging technologies at scale along with our partners spanning the value chain.
Challenges addressed by Dvara E-Registry
Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) are farmer collectives designed to improve farmers' economic and social capital. They mainly serve as the aggregation point for small and marginal farmers. Most farmers and FPOs in India face colossal challenges like lack of access to credit and insurance, information about modern and productive farming methods that yield higher crop, knowledge about sorting and grading commodities which leads to lower price realisation, a ready source on government scheme and their eligibility, and geographyspecific weather information. On top of these information gaps, farmers and FPOs face difficulty in acquiring agri-inputs and in selling their produce at fair prices. Small and marginalised farmers, in particular, find it extremely difficult to gain access to formal credit since they are deemed low value to financial institutions.
What are the solutions being offered?
Providing loans to farmers is not a recipe for their success, or for the lending institution. The loans are economic resources for farmers that enable them to facilitate their small business. It is equally crucial for both the farmer and financial institution that the farmer succeeds and profits from their activity. This can empower the entire agri value chain and facilitate the flow of credit. To enable this empowerment, all stakeholders in the agri value chain require an integrated platform that informs and creates linkages generating productivity for all.
With a vision to address these problems faced by FPOs and farmers, Dvara E-Registry (DER) has created the Doordrishti Platform that addresses these challenges by providing tightly integrated farm services and financial solutions. Doordrishti reaches out to the farmers via FPOs providing innovative solutions to their unique problems both at an organisational and individual level. DER helps the FPOs in digitising their business which is important in estimating the health of their crops (i.e. their business) and other relevant data that establishes better business linkages in a timely manner. To cater to FPOs, the Doordrishti FPO Saathi web application acts as an information backbone providing crop production and status estimates, farmer engagement and access, warehouse and credit linkages, price dissemination, a mechanism to enable aggregation of input demand and farmer outputs. Doordrishti helps the farmers succeed by engaging them through a mobile application where they receive customised crop advisory, information on their FPO's procurement activities, weather updates and alerts, credit and warehouse linkages and price dissemination. To ensure no farmer is left behind, farmers who do not have access to smartphones receive information via SMSs.
This platform has already been implemented with several FPOs and with Dvara's recent empanelment as a Cluster-Based Business Organization with Small Farmers' Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC) and National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED), DER will help FPOs take off from day one of creation via Doordrishti. As of date, DER has a presence in eight states across the country and reaches 18,000 farmers through its FPOs.
