Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates Reaches Bhubaneswar On Odisha Visit

Bhubaneswar: Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates arrived in Bhubaneswar on Tuesday on a visit to Odisha.

During this trip to the state, he is likely to visit Krushi Bhawan, an architectural marvel and facility developed for Agriculture & Farmers’ Empowerment.

Apart from assessing the operation of the Krushi Samiksha Kendra at Krushi Bhavan in Bhubaneswar, Gates is likely to meet Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Wednesday.

“During my trip I’ll get to see India’s DPI in action. I’ll visit an agricultural monitoring centre in the state of Odisha where government officials use DPI to give farmers real-time guidance. Thanks to Aadhaar, this centre is able to maintain a registry of 7.5 million farmers—even if they don’t own land—and their crops, so officials can keep track of who is growing what (and, therefore, what kind of farming advice they need). It has also developed a chatbot that makes it easy for farmers to get the latest information about their crops, using AI to tailor content to their particular needs and in their local language,” Gates wrote in his blog while admiring India’s innovative spirit and its digital public infrastructure.

“This service’s pest-management programme now reaches more than 4 million farmers, and since it began in 2018, the volume of crops that participating farmers lose to pests every year has dropped by 90 per cent. Now others—including other states in India as well as Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the World Bank—are looking to learn from Odisha’s experience with this service as well as its biometric ID and digital payments systems,” he said.

Gates further mentioned about his upcoming visit to a low-income community in Odisha where a government programme is helping women get the skills to fulfil government construction contracts. “Since 2018, this programme has helped 22,000 groups of women deliver on more than 52,000 projects including building roads, drains, and toilets,” he wrote.

This programme could be a model for other countries that are facing similar challenges, he said.

In April 2017, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Odisha government to improve the lives of small farmers and also to promote inclusive agricultural transformation in presence of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.

The foundation has been working closely with Odisha in developing data-based decision systems for agriculture, fisheries, and animal resources sectors; diversification to high-value crops; strengthening FPOs and shaping inclusive markets; digital extension; predictive technology, and integrated farming.