PROJECT - KISAN MITRA HELPLINE
Kisan Mitra was started as an initiative to provide a helpline to farmers and to serve as a grievance and accountability mechanism. Since its inception in 2017, the KM helpline has been receiving several distress calls from farmers and has worked on addressing their grievances, empathized with them, collected data and followed through on their issues, which in some cases involved meeting with the officials and doing field follow ups; this helpline has also served as a channel to educate farmers about policies and their rights (credit facilities, insurance against crop failures, loan waivers, etc.)
Impact so far -
Around 13K issues were logged out of which 9700 have been addressed and 3500 are pending
Systemic changes like proper functioning of procurement centers and increase in per acre of crop procurement have been achieved
Minimum Support Price (MSP) for crop procurement has been ensured (ex. Jowar MSP was Rs. 2430 per quintal but procurement centers were giving only Rs.1800-2000 and KM team intervened and escalated to district officials to get this addressed)
Around 150 Joint Liability Groups(JLG) (covering ~700 tenant farmers) were supported with a loan of Rs.1 Lakh to 1.5 lakh per group
Around 140 families were provided alternate livelihood options (equipment, training, etc.)
60,000 crop advisory messages regarding pest infestations and prevention/remediation were sent to farmers based on their area and crops they grow
Suicide cases were presented to the district with the root causes and reasons documented for each
Food relief was provided to around 48 families and 55 families impacted adversely by COVID and floods respectively.
Plans going forward -
Kisan Mitra Team will continue to operate in the 4 districts and look for potential opportunities to expand to other districts
Kisan Mitra (KM) will be run primarily by the Rythu Swaraj Vedika (RSV) team (without District Administration funding), which has been very involved in the last 4 years as well
KM has already started operating without District Administration(DA) support in Kadapa (which was started in 2020) and they have been able to function successfully. Collaboration with DA has been positive because of no financial obligation involved now
KM will have a central team with 1 coordinator (Harsha) and 4 counselors (all from RSV team)
They will work closely with local bodies (FPOs, local NGOs, community orgs) for issues, and follow ups
The team will also work towards publishing data analysis in the public domain so that it can be used for broader awareness