15-year old Yog Suryakant Panjarale from the Nandurbar region of Maharashtra observed that his father would visit the farm at odd hours to turn-on or turn-off the motor on the tube-well located at their farm almost 5 km away from their house. Pandemic or no-pandemic, his father, Suryakant Panjarale’s schedule, never changed. “The irrigation schedule needs to be maintained,” highlights Suryakant Panjarale.
Yog, who started learning coding online from WhiteHat Jr and has attended 132 classes till date, had other ideas. He started working on an IoT based application which could help farmers like his father manage farm equipment from home. The other benefit was that his solution could help minimise water-wastage and reduce the monthly electricity bills of the farm. Yog was encouraged to pursue this project by his teacher at WhiteHat Jr, Somadatta Bandyopadhyay, who said, “We encourage children to observe problems around them and see how they can deploy coding to find practical solutions.”
“The concept of IoT is being embraced worldwide. It is time that the farming community benefits from the same as well. The smile that I saw on my father’s face when I showed him the application was priceless. I feel special to have contributed to make his life simpler in my own small way,” says Yog.
Proud of his son’s achievement, Yog’s father Suryakant Panjarale said, “Yog is a very perceptive boy. He often accompanies me to the farm and is always trying to understand what problems we face there. He then starts trying to think of how he can make things better. I was extremely happy and very proud of my son when I saw the Farmer Helper app. I know that what he is learning at WhiteHat Jr is further helping him turn his ideas into reality. I would love to see him come up with more such ideas to help farmers.”
Yog doesn’t want to stop here. He plans to keep on exploring the world of coding further to create more such interesting solutions for real life problems.