Krishi Lakshmi

Krishi Lakshmi is a game on agriculture for helping individuals to understand the cost and benefits of different kinds of inputs (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and so on) and practices like ploughing, irrigation, weeding, transportation among many. This is a simple game in which the player who is a marginal or small farmer will be facing the harsh realities of agriculture like they do in their normal day-to-day agriculture and understand whether crop insurance would be helpful for them in the long run or not. Game aims to highlight the importance of crop insurance to deal with externality, uncertainty and risk involved in crop production and how insurance can be a method to mitigate such risks. Objectives of the game are • To make players (marginal and small farmers) aware of the financial implications of various choices in crop cultivation on the net profit for the season and net worth of the family • To make players aware of the implications of crop input choices on the net profit for the season • To make players aware of the implications of using different types of financial solutions and using different types of crop insurance options to meet crop contingencies Target Audience • Marginal and Small Farmers • Rural youths (Age between 20-30) from farming community who are interested in taking up agriculture as their source of livelihood • Development professionals who are engaged in training of farmers for livelihood based on agriculture Game Play Game play involves the use of credit, insurance and crop technology to counter the uncertainty/ challenges in farming and achieve targets of increase in profit and net-worth. There are three cropping seasons Kharif, Rabi and Zaid and the player must cross all the three seasons for each of the plots he/she has by crop planning and performing various agricultural actions. These actions based on his/her agricultural experience would have a significant impact on the learnings and game outcomes. Moreover, through the game, the player has to respond to the various uncertainty and challenges of the crop in each season. The player can also to play out various good practices which would benefit him/ her by an increase in its yield which ultimately can an impact on their net-worth and profits. A household to each the player belongs to, has to meet the living expenses on food/cloths in addition to cost of cultivation and technologies used for better growth. If the household uses insurance and credit, it has to pay the premium for the insurance and interest for the credit along with planning their household needs and expenses. The challenge is that the player has to have with them in cash to purchase the services or apply the technology for crop input. If this is not available, the player would have to seek loan for which he/she has to have the credit worthiness for getting adequate credit. If credit is not available, then the farmer has to sell his/her assets to make sure the game play occurs. Thus, the learning for the farmer would be to plan better with all of these factors in mind, when they decide on various inputs and crops. For household expenses, data refers to National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) 66th round data on family demand on expenditure. For productivity data, game refers to Department of Economics and Statistics starting from 2014. Thereafter it uses a flat inflation of 5% per year. For the occurrence of adverse event, game refers to farmer.gov.in and for other practices game refers www.indiastat.com. The credit available to the player or in this case the ‘farmer’, is a maximum of the value of the non-cash asset that he/she possesses. Moreover, this loan is available from multiple sources such as banks, MFIs, input trader, SHGs, relatives etc. Once the farmer applied for the loan, the game validates the loan process and ensure necessary loan appraisal process needs to be completed in order to receive the loan amount in the account of the player.