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Bhubaneswar: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is scheduled to visit Odisha capital on February 28, reports said.<\/p>\n
Gates will visit the Krushi Bhawan in the city on that day.<\/p>\n
Mentioning about the visit in his blog, Gates wrote, \u201cI\u2019ll visit an agricultural monitoring center in the state of Odisha where government officials use DPI to give farmers real-time guidance. Thanks to Aadhaar, this center is able to maintain a registry of 7.5 million farmers\u2014even if they don\u2019t own land\u2014and their crops, so officials can keep track of who is growing what (and, therefore, what kind of farming advice they need). It has also developed a chatbot that makes it easy for farmers to get the latest information about their crops, using AI to tailor content to their particular needs and in their local language.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis service\u2019s pest-management program now reaches more than 4 million farmers, and since it began in 2018, the volume of crops that participating farmers lose to pests every year has dropped by 90 percent. Now others\u2014including other states in India as well as Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the World Bank\u2014are looking to learn from Odisha\u2019s experience with this service as well as its biometric ID and digital payments systems,\u201d he said in the blog.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis week, I\u2019ll visit a low-income community in Odisha where a government program is helping women get the skills to fulfill government construction contracts. Since 2018, this program has helped 22,000 groups of women deliver on more than 52,000 projects including building roads, drains, and toilets,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Notably, the Odisha Government had in 2017 signed an MoU with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to bring in increased use of data management in agriculture sector. The agreement aims at improving lives of small farmers and promote inclusive growth in the sector.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n