World Water Conservation Day: Maithili Appalwar was working with a not-for-profit in Yavatmal district of Maharashtra to strengthen the mental well being of farmers. While working on the ground, she rapidly realised that rather than creating interventions to strengthen their mental well being, options to aid them strengthen their yield would be advantageous.
“Farmers, despite having 5-7 acres of land, were living in dilapidated condition. Water scarcity was coming up over and again in conversations with them as a leading cause of their distress,” she told TheSpuzz Online.
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“They were completely dependent on rains for irrigation and if there was a scarce monsoon, farmers would lose their crop for that season,” she added.
Having worked in her household firm EMMBI Industries manufacturing specialty polymers, she leveraged her current information to launch the firm Avana in 2016 to produce economical options for farmers to strengthen their yield and livelihood. Their initial solution was Jalasanchay, a uncomplicated notion of developing artificial water storage ponds and lining it with a polymer sheet to assure water does not percolate to the ground.
They spent the initial year innovating the solution and did a pilot with more than one hundred farmers for solution improvement. They had to assure it could stand the harsh climatic circumstances and hold lakhs of liters of water. One of the big alterations was introduced in 2017 when they decided to double the width of the panels that have been joint with each other, making use of heat, to produce one big lining sheet. Earlier the panels have been 15 meters extended and six-feet wide. The rationale was to cut down the joints in the sheet to lower the probabilities of leakage.
“We created a new loom to produce the polymer sheet that was double the size, almost 13 and a half foot wide which reduced the chance of leakage by 50%,” she stated.
“Right now we’re not the only company selling polymer liners but we are the company with the world’s widest woven polythene-based panels,” she added.
The most difficult portion was convincing farmers to invest Rs 2 lakhs as the initial one-time expense for lining the 2,000 square meters pond. But, what helped was the outcomes of farmers from the pilot. “We kept track of their income, the number of growing seasons they got and in many cases, we saw their income doubled. Once we had the data, it became easy to convince others,” stated the firm’s COO Yash Punjabi. To assure farmers get their bang for the buck, they also provide a 5-year solution warranty.
They have supplied to the farmers in the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Their largest order was from Florida in the US for the 2700-acre pond.
Cut to 2021, Appalwar claims that the firm has installed Jalasanchay in about 20,000 ponds and has an annualised income of Rs 70 crore.
Next on the cards is a intelligent water pump starter to allow farmers to get started and cease their water pump in the field remotely.