Page 22 - Reliance Foundation Annual Report 2022-23

20 Rural Transformation
Empowering
communities with
information
Reliance Foundation
Information Services
The Reliance Foundation Information Services (RFIS)
programme has evolved as a platform for addressing
information asymmetry for improving lives and
livelihood. Through a time-tested and evolving
phygital approach, key livelihood information across
three major themes i.e agriculture, livestock and
marine fisheries is disseminated. Its defining feature is
that it adopts a multi stakeholder, need-based model
for information collection, aggregation and
dissemination, contributing to synergy in the
development sector. RFIS acts as a bridge between two
main audiences, i.e., the community and its knowledge
partners and experts. The programme continues to
evolve by scaling up its user base and increasing
penetration in the existing user base, by the use of
newer and effective technology thereby improving
their lives and livelihood, and empowering its target
audience. The programme sources accurate and
relevant information from 1,000+ partners and in
an effort to democratise access to information,
disseminates it in 10 Indian languages.
The key areas of intervention are:
• Improving yield and income while reducing
cost of cultivation. Addressing yield gaps of
nine nationally significant crops, and addressing
food security. The programme involves
developing package of practices that are
tailored to agro-climatic conditions and are
aimed at increasing yield while lowering cost
of production
• Safe and economic fishing for marine fisherfolk.
• Economic empowerment of women through
efficient crop and livestock management
In the year 2022-23, the programme worked with
nearly 20 lakh farmers who are cultivating paddy,
wheat, maize, bengal gram, red gram, Black gram,
groundnut, mustard, soybean and cotton, across
135 districts of 16 States of India. Also, over 2 lakh
fisher folk across Indian coastline received critical
ocean weather and potential fishing zone information.
Reliance Foundation | Annual Report 2022-23
Empowering farmers and fisher
folk with technology-based
knowledge solutions
The RFIS programme helped farmers enhance crop
yields, and safeguard livestock. In 2022-23, the
programme addressed 2 lakh queries related to weather
based agro-livestock-marine, government schemes,
various stages of crop and livestock management
issues. Given that more than 60% of the farmers served
by Reliance Foundation Information Services keep
livestock, livestock camps were conducted in
partnership with the Animal Husbandry Department
and veterinary universities to diagnose and treat
animals, and provide critical veterinary services in
remote villages. Over 87,000 animals were treated
through livestock camps (nearly 6,80,000 animals
treated since inception). In addition, the farmers were
also given free medicines and counselling for improving
livestock health.
Reliance Foundation endeavours to make fishing safer,
sustainable and profitable for marine fisher-folk along
21
India’s expansive coastline with information support
from Indian National Centre for Ocean Information
Services (INCOIS) and India Meteorological
Department. The Machli app, developed by the RFIS
programme, provides real time weather and
oceanographic information for all major landing
centres to over 10,000 users across the coastline.
During FY 2022-23, information was provided in 10
languages like English, Bengali, Odia, Telugu, Tamil,
Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi.
The targeted outcomes of the programme such as
increasing climate resilience of communities,
improving household income, improving participation
of women in decision making at household and
community level, increasing share of women in
household income and economy through capacity
building, reducing the input costs, averting losses,
increasing productivity, better price realisation,
enhancing livestock productivity and promoting
micro-enterprises etc.