Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to visit Bhubaneswar on February 28

Bhubaneswar: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is scheduled to visit Odisha capital on February 28, reports said.

Gates will visit the Krushi Bhawan in the city on that day.

Mentioning about the visit in his blog, Gates wrote, “I’ll 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—even if they don’t own land—and 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.”

“This service’s 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—including other states in India as well as Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the World Bank—are looking to learn from Odisha’s experience with this service as well as its biometric ID and digital payments systems,” he said in the blog.

“This week, I’ll 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,” he added.

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.