15-year-old creates app to help farmers manage equipment remotely

When15-year old Yog Suryakant Panjarale from the Nandurbar region of Maharashtra, who is a student of Class X, observed that his father had to visit their farm almost 5 km away at odd hours just to turn-on or turn-off the motor of the tubewell there, he was upset over the inconvenience caused to him. Pandemic or no-pandemic, his father, Suryakant Panjarale’s schedule, never changed as he would not take the risk of disrupting the irrigation schedule.

This was motivation enough for Yog, who started learning coding online from WhiteHat Jr and has attended 132 classes till date. 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 Somadatta Bandyopadhyay.

“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 says, “Yog is a very perceptive boy. He often accompanies me to the farm and is always trying to understand what problems that we face there. He then starts thinking about 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 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. TNS