COMMONSense

After a long time when you are with your parents you don’t like to go out on weekends and wish to spend the entire weekend with them. It was this time when my friend and mentor Narendraji called me to his native village Channakeshavpura (CK Pura), Pavgada. I happened to agree to go to CK Pura half heartily. On Friday we started our journey. We were nine of us in a Qualis with full energy, cracking all sorts of jokes. All were happy since we had met after a long time. We spent our journey in sharing the latest updates of our life.

We reached CK Pura around 1 O’clock midnight and Narendraji’s family was waiting for us. All of us in a sleepy mood had our dinner and slept planning to go to the farm the next day. The morning in the village life is so fresh. It had been days since I had breathed clean air. My ears were happy not to hear the honking sounds with which you are welcomed every morning in Bangalore. The village atmosphere was so nice. I was very happy since my mobile was showing “NO NETWORK COVERAGE”. Wonderful, I said and set out like the only King in the middle of the road to see the farm. Everybody was very relaxed free from hectic atmosphere of Bangalore.

The farm had “adike tota” (areca nut trees), coconut trees and rest of the field was ploughed for the upcoming season. The main crop of CK Pura was Groundnuts. The farmers and workers stared at us as we walked in the farm. We stopped near a well and relaxed for sometime. The atmosphere was cool and people chose their own interests to spend the time. Few people swam in the well and few took a nap and I was busy taking some snaps. It was time for us to return back to home for dinner. On the way back we stopped at the coconut farm and had little coconut water.

As we were walking back home we saw a strange board which read “COMMONSense Project, with IISc” and soon everybody started laughing saying “Probably this project is used to measure the common sense of the people in this village.” We came to know about this project only in the evening during our music session when Mr. Sheshgiri walked in. He had heard from Narendraji about us. He told us that people from this village, with help of IISc are doing a project called “Community based Natural Resources Management using Sensor networks” which in short is called as “COMMONSense” project. This is when everybody eyebrows were raised and the topic arouse curiosity in the group. It was actually very impressive that people from this village were contributing to the development of the village.


He told that this is one of its kind of the project where in the effort was to use Wi-Fi technology outside the conference room for the first time. It is very easy to use Wi-Fi technology in a conference room since the environmental conditions are almost stable and risk in making it to work is very less, but as soon as the Wi-Fi starts interacting outside the conference room, lot of issues will come such as signal strength, signal fluttering due to wind etc. The risk in the implementation was very high.

The team consisted of around four people in the project M/s Suma, Hidayat, one more person (I don’t remember his name) and Sheshgiri himself. Sheshgiri who was post graduate in Chemistry was looking after the project management. Hidayat was pursuing 2nd year ITI – Electronics and he was responsible for installing all the sensors and other electronic setup on the field. Sheshgiri proudly said that Hidayat had recently learn’t the skill of data entry. Suma was pursuing her 2nd year MCA and she managed the entire website which collected the data from field and created a report. She also wrote codes to manage the sensors and probes on the field.

The team collecting various parameters which would influence the fertility of the soil and also the water level from various fields thru’ sensors, and this data was stored in a flash memory which was later transferred to a memory disk (normal pen drive fulfilled this purpose) and created a report and sent it to IISc for further research and also, they educated the farmers with that to take precautionary measures to grow good crops.

Sheshgiri told us that people from IISc helped them only over the phone and whenever they came to the village they came for short visit. This actually helped the Sheshgiri’s team to troubleshoot the problems by themselves. Sheshgiri also told that Honeywell and Wipro corporations also visited CK Pura to see the project so that they can further develop this project. Sheshgiri ironically said “They just came and went”.

I was really touched by Sheshgiri’s intentions on using village people as resources. He said youngsters from village go to Bangalore for working and earn around 4K to 6K because they are not educated to get a high salaried job. By working part time on this project, people would get good experience on the system, exposure towards computers and above all a certificate from IISc which will help them to earn a better remuneration. Concluding his talk he said they were not looking for funds, they were looking for engineers who can come and work with them to increase the number of applications that this COMMONSense can perform, give innovative ideas to improve the current system. His words had the urge to improve the current condition of the village and villagers. Not many people think like Sheshgiri, who stay back in their own villages to improve it. With all the words from Sheshgiri in our minds we started back our journey back to Bangalore.

This COMMONSense project provoked me to write this post after a long time. I am happy now that I made this trip; else I guess I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see the work of Sheshgiri.

For more information on COMMONSense project, you can logon to http://commonsensenet.in/