All of us feel connected with some specific philosophies and try to stick upon it. No matter what the circumstances you face, there are always some principles that can’t let things go and happen whatever is going on. Being born and brought up in a village in India, I have experienced this quote by the beloved father of the nation, Gandhiji. I have experienced that craving for success or becoming something big in the eyes of people whom I lived in my childhood.
It is rightly said that you get to protect your own dreams. Following that wholeheartedly, I came up with an Idea of KhedutPay. In my childhood, I was highly influenced by thoughts of Gandhiji as he always had faith in rural India even in the time of British rule. It is our responsibility to carry that thought in our minds whenever we are dealing with people from villages. They might have a lack of communication skills, but I have seen many farmers forecasting the weather more precisely than any application many times.
From the eyes of Gandhiji, rural India is a golden sparrow without any exaggeration. The real India is living in villages. Gandhiji believed that generalizing villages will perish and India will perish, too. Thus he suggested Gram Swaraj- where each village decodes its own problems and looks for solutions. One solution can’t apply to each part of the nation.
One more aspect of the Gandhian philosophy for rural India needs to be decentralized. With more than 6,00,000 villages, Gandhiji believed the same about villages that no village can be operated by a government sitting far from the real place. Hence, whatever needs to be executed it should be right from local places, not from somewhere else. People living in any particular area know the problems of that region better than others, so it is very obvious that the solution also could be coming from the people of the same village/ region.
This same happened with me when I started off with KhedutPay, an organization serving farmers of Gujarat. Where we were committed to provide a platform to all the sellers and make a competitive market to benefit farmers. Before this, we saw a gap between farmers and sellers as many farmers did not get to choose the right product for them. To eliminate this problem, we introduced a missed call service with agriculture experts guiding them on call. We got a huge response to that, as till now, there were very few platforms where farmers were guided genuinely without trying to sell. These honest efforts in solving their problems made them believe in us and they started ordering different products from us.
Having knowledge of rural areas because I have lived there helped me to understand and solve their problems. Slowly & steadily we are expanding teams and establishing ourselves as a stop solution for all the farmers' needs. I would say, Gandhiji was right about rural solutions, hence no other person from a privileged background can answer a farmer's question.
