Professor Vijaya B Marisetty and Dr Varsha Mamidi from the School of Management Studies, University of Hyderabad have received a competitive research grant of close to Rs 1 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India.
The grant will help in developing a blockchain platform with a robot-advising facility for the onboarding of around one million farmers across India in the pilot phase. The platform enables farm-producing organisations to engage with farming ecosystem players, including, lenders, input suppliers and output customers.
Given that blockchain technology provides security, trust and transparency, the project expects more value chain benefits and a more democratic distribution of wealth for farmers. The project will run for two years and later it is expected to be scaled up as a pan-India platform.
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Expressing happiness at the research grant secured, Professor B J Rao, Vice-Chancellor, UoH, said, “We are a multidisciplinary university, and as such, we have to perform exceedingly well in all disciplines, and I am happy that a grant of this magnitude involving around one million farmers, will do wonders for the stature of the University of Hyderabad. I congratulate Professor Marisetty and Dr Mamidi and wish them the very best in successful completion of this project and later scaling it up to pan-India level.”
Earlier, Professor Marisetty and Dr Mamidi had received blockchain use case grants through the Institution of Eminence (IoE) for developing cold chain logistics platforms for the pharma industry with Dr Reddy's Laboratories as the industry partner. They have also won an international blockchain hackathon in Dubai and a blockchain hackathon run by the National Payment Corporation of India.
