Microsoft co-founder and also a philanthropist Bill Gates came to Odisha’s capital on Tuesday night and is scheduled to attend several programmes on Wednesday.
In addition, he will meet with the State Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and he will be present at other events related to the “Jaga Mission” (aimed at slum development), the “Mukta” scheme (providing localized employment opportunities for the urban poor), and “Mission Shakti ” as per officials. One of the several programs will focus on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for farmers.
Gate’s last visit to India was on March 2023, during the visit he had meetings with several key individuals, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Relationship Between Bill Gates and Odisha
Since 2017, Odisha government’s Department of Agriculture and Farmer Empowerment and the Fisheries and Animal Resource Department have collaborated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for innovation in data-driven decision-making.
The Bill Gates Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Odisha government in 2021.
‘India’s Innovations are still changing the world’, says Gates
Few days back on February 25, Bill Gates in his blog ‘Gate Notes’ under the title “India’s Innovations are still changing the world”, Bill Gates wrote that he is gonna visit a low-income community in Odisha where a government programme is helping women to get the skills to fulfil government construction contracts.
“Since 2018, this programme has helped 22,000 groups of women deliver on more than 52,000 projects including building roads, drains, and toilets,” he wrote.
Sharing his admiration for India’s innovative spirit, especially Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) Gates highlighted that during his trip, he will get to see India’s DPI in action, “During my trip I’ll get to see India’s DPI in action. I’ll visit an agricultural monitoring center in the state of Odisha where government officials use DPI to give farmers real-time guidance. Thanks to Aadhaar, this center is able to maintain a registry of 7.5 million farmers—even if they don’t own land—and their crops, so officials can keep track of who is growing what (and, therefore, what kind of farming advice they need). It has also developed a chatbot that makes it easy for farmers to get the latest information about their crops, using AI to tailor content to their particular needs and in their local language,” Gates wrote.
Gates appreciative of India
“This service’s pest-management program now reaches more than 4 million farmers, and since it began in 2018, the volume of crops that participating farmers lose to pests every year has dropped by 90 percent. Now others—including other states in India as well as Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the World Bank—are looking to learn from Odisha’s experience with this service as well as its biometric ID and digital payments system,” he added.
He also added that India’s most important contributions to the world is its ability to innovate, “India’s greatest gift is its ability to innovate. This country has a long history of important breakthroughs. (Mathematicians in ancient India are widely credited with introducing the decimal system for numbers.) More recently, India has made advances that are saving and improving millions of lives in India and around the world.”
Gates also mentioned about his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during this visit to India and said that their main topic of discussion is gonna be to learn how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, can continue to help India with its ideas.
“The Gates Foundation has been a partner in some of these efforts, and I’m visiting this week to learn about how we can continue working with India to help its ideas and inventions reach everyone who needs them, no matter where they live. This will be a main topic when I meet with Prime Minister Modi this week,” he wrote.
