Visakhapatnam: While most young engineering graduates are busy chasing their corporate dreams and hefty pay cheques, Bollem Raj Kumar, a local boy, has chosen to help the farming community.
He studies various aspects of farming in the two Telugu-speaking states and offers solutions and tips to farmers to improve their yield.
In 2011, while he was returning from the US, Mr Kumar had a chance interaction with a senior government employee, which changed his life.
“I was returning from the US after visiting Nasa as part of our college programme. On the flight, I met V.N. Gaba who inspired me to look into the agriculture sector,” said Mr Kumar, who studied industrial engineering at the Gitam University. He now wants to address food security issues using technology.
Mr Kumar’s motto is: Engineering for agriculture. Along with a few like-minded people, he has developed a solar-powered vehicle that can perform various farming operations like seed sowing, spraying of pesticides etc.
Mr Kumar has been invited to attend the International Youth Agriculture Summit being held in Canberra, Australia, in August by the Future Famers Network (FFN) Australia. He is one among the two people chosen from India to attend the global summit. He has also developed an app which can be used by farmers to know about new techniques as well as crop cycles. The app is being tested and will be available free of cost to the farmers.
Incidentally, to collect the data and understand agriculture, at times Mr Kumar had to pretend to be a migrant labourer as he found that most farmers are not willing to listen to an educated youngman.
