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Farm-to-market rideshare beats lockdown with app-cab efficacy

As rideshare services go, a two-tonne pickup van arriving at someone's doorstep on call wouldn't have been what Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick imagined back in March 2009 when they founded Uber . But then, Shillong-based agro-entrepreneur Peter Wallang wasn't looking for just another convenient and comfortable commute when the Covid-induced lockdown hit home this March.



As transport vanished, Wallang had no way of reaching the farmers from whom he sources supplies for his organic grocery store. Enter Meghalaya 's farm-to-market rideshare equivalent of the app cab – a service that not only saved the day for Wallang but has also kept the wheels of the state's agricultural economy going through three months of lockdown.

The Meghalaya government’s unique cloud-based 1917iTeams service is, among other things, a ride aggregator that helps farmers and buyers move fresh produce by hiring vehicles via the toll-free number 1917. It was a two-tonne 1917iTeams pickup van that Wallang used to get ginger and turmeric from Ri-Bhoi, 50km from Shillong , during Lockdown 1.0.

Thousands of rural farmers and their buyers — traders, dorbar shnongs (village committees), fair price shops, startups, self-help groups and individuals — have since benefited from 1917iTeams, which initially deployed 18 GPS-enabled vans and gradually added 82 more to the fleet as phones kept ringing off the hook.

Conceptualised by the agriculture department and Meghalaya Institute of Enterprise, 1917iTeams is modelled on the 108 emergency response service and draws inspiration from the 1917 Champaran Satyagraha that mobilised farmers in Bihar against the British.

While 1917iTeams has been around since December 2017, the initiative has taken off during the Covid crisis. "Our agro-response vehicles were ready to roll within two days of the lockdown starting. On March 27, we brought 15 tonnes of vegetables to Shillong from Puriang, 40km away," said Gavin C Shullai, programme manager of 1917iTeams.

The 31-member team works out of call centres in Shillong and Tura in the West Garo Hills. Calls are received and processed – and vans dispatched and tracked – through cloud-hosting technology. The toll-free helpline is open from 7am to 7pm, Monday to Saturday.

1917iTeams does not own vehicles. "Like Uber, we have on-boarded vans. We do not buy, sell or trade. We connect farmers to markets/buyers through ride hailing," said B K Sohliya, director of MIE and member secretary of 1917iTeams. "From 2018 to pre-Covid, our services were being used by farmers/buyers who had registered with us. But demand exploded during the lockdown," he said.

Between March 25 and June 5, 1917iTeams received 29,881 calls, a six-fold jump from the same period last year. In the true tradition of rideshare, 1917iTeams vehicles become more cost-effective when farmers aggregate their produce. "If they were unwilling to join hands before, they have started doing so now to hire our vans cheaper. The more produce a cluster transports, the bigger its market," Sohliya said. 

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