Our whole life is centered around innovation. We run a software product company – Torana where our mission is to use innovation to solve real-world problems through software.

While we are happy to build great software products, we are constantly bothered by farmer suicides in our country India. Farmers in India are still dependent on rains as a source of water for crops. Government has designed many schemes for farmers to tackle the uncertainty of nature and there are also scientific techniques which can sustain farming without dependence on rains. However, farmers simply don’t know about these.

Then, there are forests. Forests are not just about timber; they are also home to wild animals, birds, and insects. They play a crucial role in balancing the delicate ecological pyramid of the region. Due to deforestation, wild herbivores encroach farmlands for food to which farmers respond by violence, resulting in man-animal conflict.

We witnessed all this ourselves during multiple visits to villages surrounded by forests & interaction with locals. After understanding the problem, we wondered if our bias for action & innovation could be channelized in this direction.

We finally decided to start efforts right at the ground level & iterate solutions towards this issue. While our efforts are just a drop in the ocean, we do believe that a giant leap towards achieving global environmental balance starts with baby steps at the local level.

– Sandesh and Smita Gawande