FICCI Sub-Committee Meeting on Crop Protection Chemicals

Lateral Praxis participated in the Sub-Committee Meeting on Crop Protection Chemicals held at Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Federation House, New Delhi on 21st December 2015.

Agrochemicals are an important part of agriculture but spurious pesticides are a menace today and are contributing not only to the low yields, monetary loss to the farmer, deterioration in soil health and reputation loss for the industry and government. Estimates predict that the sale of such pesticides is 25% by value and 30% by volume. The agro chemical industry is looking at ways to deal not only with this but also with the negative publicity that pesticides are getting in the market.

In the meeting, Lateral Praxis presented solutions which can help in combating the menace of spurious pesticides. Although authorities and companies can contribute a great deal in changing the perception but it is also important that farmer (who is the end user) is educated about the same. India has millions of farmers and considering the reach of technology today, its best to leverage on it.

Some of the Lateral Praxis products which can assist in IT enablement of various activities and hence strengthen the interactions of all stakeholders viz. the farmers, the industry, the govt. and the regulatory bodies, are:

  • LP Partner Connect – The product enables tracking movement of any kind of agri input from dealer to retailer to farmer. The system can connect with company’s ERP to bring end to end visibility.
  • LP Smart Farm – This product enables the farmer to track his farm activities against a pre-defined activity calendar of best practices. This will ensure that appropriate and time bound activities are done on the farm. It can enable experts to advise the farmer as to the corrective actions. Provides an impetus to ‘sustainable’ agriculture production and brings transparency for the consumer.
  • Guppy – Guppy aims at creating networks of farmers with other stakeholders and helps in building the unstructured history of the farm. Allows sharing of text, pictures and voice files. In addition to good agriculture practices, information about the campaigns, Kisan Melas, awareness about the product features could be shared using this.
  • Customer Care System – Enables registering and responding to farmer complaints.
  • SMS facility – This can allow users of all kinds of phones to get information e.g. about the genuineness of a product, the address of an authorized retailer in an area, information on campaigns, Kisan Melas.