There have been several prior initiatives in India to combat the lack of data in rural areas in India. However, many available data are not easy to access or visualise, and may require a certain degree of processing before they can be turned into interpretable information for decision-making. One such notable example is Mission Antyodaya, launched in 2017 by the Indian Government to collect data at the village level on, inter alia, agriculture, land improvement, infrastructure development, rural electrification, and growth in non-conventional energy sources. Although digitally recorded, this open-source data is scattered and needs to be processed into geospatial format and analysed to maximise its utility. The interactive web map developed by BASE and Empa as a Google Earth Engine application offers one such synthesis by collating and visualising different raster and vector data layers related to India’s fresh produce supply chain. Relevant spatially distributed data on cropland mask, elevation, predicted electricity network lines, crop production of fruits and vegetables, temperature, solar radiance, roads, availability of markets, households engaged in farming, distribution of farmer producers’ organisations, and mobile band coverage have been visualised at a district level (or block-level, for some states) through this one-of-a-kind map.
This visual representation of the selected data layers serves as a decision-making tool for stakeholders form the public and private sector in the fresh produce supply chain, including social enterprises like farmer producer organisations and policymakers, as well as financial institutions, cooling providers, NGOs, and government bodies.
A practical example of this is identifying where cooling could provide the highest shelf-life gains and where to site future cold storage facilities. Cold storage rooms can add value to farming products, thereby witnessing an increasing demand nationwide. However, these cold rooms can adequately benefit farmers only when they are conveniently placed and meet all criteria to protect the crops. The deliberations of where to place a cold room depend on several factors, which may vary by state. Identifying promising cooling unit locations demands expert guidance and technical know-how, which due to the infancy and nicheness of the cooling industry in India, may be difficult to find. The map simplifies this process for cold room operators by computing ideal locations within a 20 km market radius, at most 500 m away from the road, with stable network coverage, and other state-wise considerations. This is the first step towards an application where users are able to compute promising cold room locations by dynamically deciding which layers to include and their thresholds.
Furthermore, cold storage can increase the number of days farmers take to secure profitable sales for their produce instead of liquidating their crops at low rates before it spoils. The map represents the shelf-life gain for selected crops (potatoes, apples, and bananas) across India. These calculations offer farmers and cold storage operators critical information on the added benefit of using (respectively, offering) cold storage with an actionable metric: the number of shelf-life days gained by storing fruits and vegetables in a cold room vs at ambient temperature.
The learnings from this map will be complemented by an easy-to-use Your VCCA app to help cold room operators digitally check-in and check-out crates brought in by the farmers, indicate the number of remaining shelf-life days, and provide market intelligence. Stay tuned for the release of the app’s first version in April 2022.