Improving Farmer Lives with Technology

A farmer in Barmer. A 20-kilometre journey just to fill out a subsidy form. A pile of documents, affidavits, and countersignatures — each one a small tax on time he doesn’t have.

This was the everyday reality for millions of farmers across Rajasthan: offices scattered across departments that don’t talk to each other, inspections with no timeline and no accountability, paid middlemen who exist only because the system makes them necessary. Not corruption by design, just friction, everywhere, compounding.

Someone in the government decides this can be rebuilt from scratch. Not with another scheme layered on top of the old mess, but with a single question driving every decision: what does the farmer actually need?

The team behind it borrows an approach rarely seen in government — treating a public service like a product, testing it, breaking it, rebuilding it around real user behaviour instead of departmental convenience.

But building the tool is only half the story. Getting officials across competing departments to actually use it, getting farmers with no internet access to trust it, and getting a system built for millions to still feel personal, that’s the harder climb.