In line with its vision to empower the farming community, FMC India, a leading innovation driven Agricultural Sciences company is supporting farmers towards a better and prosperous life through their community outreach program – Project Samarth. Aimed at providing farmers with pure water and good health, FMC India has undertaken a campaign to ensure that safe and potable drinking water is accessible to 200,000 farmer families within the next 3 years in India.
The company has already set up 21 large community water filtration plants, and a swipe-card enabled dispensing system based on RO technology in various villages of Uttar Pradesh. It plans to install another 20 plants in villages of the state by April 2021.
The latest plant was commissioned at village Mokalpur (District Gonda) on December 9, 2020 and is expected to meet the drinking water needs of nearly 1000 farmer families in nearby areas.
The addition of this plant has expanded the accessibility of potable water to nearly 60,000 farmer families in Uttar Pradesh under Project Samarth.
Apart from these plants, FMC has also installed 52 water filtration and chilling plants at 52 Sugarcane co-operative societies in Uttar Pradesh. Sugarcane growing farmers regularly visit these societies and will now have safe and cold drinking water available at these centers throughout the year. These plants are expected to serve nearly 20,000 farmers every month.
Pramod Thota, President, FMC India, said, “Sustainability is one of FMC’s core values. Project SAMARTH is an expression of our commitment to improving the health and living standards of Indian farmers and their families, while making them more sustainable. Under this project, we are commissioning community water filtration plants in identified villages across Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab in the first phase of the project to increase access to clean, potable water to support farmers with the basic facility of drinking water. The access to safe and reliable water source for the farming community will reduce their daily struggles of collecting water and this time can be invested into other means of revenue generation and practicing sustainable farming. Based on experience in these villages, the project may be extended to more states across the country”.
Project Samarth (Samarth = ‘empowered’ in Hindi), is aimed at empowering the farming communities towards a better and more prosperous life. Various farmer focused projects are either running or are under initiation as pillars of the Project Samarth.
Apart from Safe Water drive, FMC is also running other initiatives under Project Samarth to uplift the farming community. FMC India technical field experts are training nearly 2 million farmers annually on good agricultural practices. This initiative promotes sustainable farming practices among farmers.
As a part of its other core value of safety, FMC has been running a major Awareness campaign during the pandemic called ‘COVID-Safe Farmers’, wherein more than 100,000 masks, 5000 PPE kits and 7900 bottles of sanitizer (200ml) have already been distributed by FMC among farmers and farmer facing officials. All these initiatives are run in close association with local government and farming communities.
