Monday, December 2, 2002		Feature

Farmer who grows data
M. Suchitra

AS the farmers’ organisations mount their agitation against globalisation and as policy makers tax their brains for solving the crisis in the farm sector, one man has been trying almost single-handedly for the last five years to collect information on various aspects of farming from diverse sources and explore a path for the state to emerge unscathed out of the WTO maze.

For 42-year- old A.V. Narayanaswami, a coffee planter in Wayanad, it has been a labour of love — to his vocation as a farmer and as a Keralite concerned about the woes of the state’s farm sector.
His huge data collection currently runs into over 1.5 lakh Web pages in more than 300 modules. The database covers the state’s farm potential, the new norms of production, packaging, marketing and certification taking effect at the global level, the major players in the area of multilateral negotiations, the kind of expert services that are and that could be available to farmers and the manner in which the state’s farming activities could be reoriented towards higher production.

Collecting and digitising such huge volumes of data is very strenuous. The work is divided within the family. Narayana Swamy, his wife Prabha and 15-year-old son, Vishnu, and 13-year-old daughter, Veda, learnt the computer programming and Web technologies and persistently improved their skills. They together collected over 1,000 varieties of plants, identified and indexed them and then measured the light, temperature and the relative humidity four times a day. The voluminous data thus generated were digitised. A lot of information has been collected on calendar of operations, the maximum residue limits of chemical, phyto-sanitary standards, legal aspects of farming and commodity market derivatives etc.