Satara:
For decades, farmers in Maharashtra's Satara village would spend their day waiting for power to irrigate their fields. Now that's changed, thanks to a simple innovation.
Today, sitting at home, farmers like Shobha can turn on the water pump a few kilometres away in the fields.
All she has to do is work her mobile phone, wait for a recorded message, and feed in a code. And the pump works automatically.
Another farmer in the area, Santosh Dhole, tells us, "Power is often restored in the middle of the night and earlier we had to go to the fields to turn on the motor. It's dark and there are snakes. Now we can operate the motor from home."
"It's very useful in a situation when you have power for just 3-4 hours in a day. Now you don't have to waste time and electricity walking long distances to switch on the motor," says Chetana Gala Sinha, an activist and a farmer.
So how does the Remote Mobile Starters - as it is called - work? The farmer has to buy two cell phones. He retains one, while the other is installed at the water pump. This phone has a modem that controls the switches of the pump set. The farmer has to dial a preset code to operate the switch.
The kit costs about Rs 6,000 and has been developed by a Pune-based innovator.
"We have sold about 12000 equipment in one year. There has been a very good response especially from remote areas," says Vijay Mehta, from Khyati Technologies.
It's a simple technology that is changing the lives of many farmers in Satara, liberating them from routine manual tasks.