Co-Founder (2020 - 2021)

A Passion Project to solve the Problem of local fish farmers who suffer from inadequate and affordable ways to check up on their fish health

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Background

****I grew up in a small town of Nagaon, Assam. There are a lot of fish farmers around my house, and I used to see the poor economic condition of the fish farmers and also used to see regular dead fish in their ponds. When I started researching the fish industry, I understood that aquaculture is one of the most profitable businesses in agriculture and allied sectors, and still, our fish farmers were struggling to make money. And I wanted to help those farmers reach the optimum production at affordable prices. It has happened many times that their whole yield is ruined, and later, it was found that the death of fish was due to changes in concentrations of compounds like Ammonia or nitrate, among others. Like my neighbors, there are 1.3 million fish farmers in India who see their whole income drained away due to poor water quality, which could have been easily controlled by them.

Condition of the fish farmers:

These inland fisheries are small in size and highly fragmented. They are mostly small family businesses; you can imagine them as a typical farmer who is not skilled with technology. As a fish farmer, let them know whether the parameters have crossed their threshold value or not. Now, not all farmers are aware that the health of the fish is directly affected by water quality.

Problem Identification:

When we say the water quality, it is determined by parameters like concentrations of Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite, and Dissolved oxygen, along with pH, Turbidity, salinity, and temperature. Any change in these parameters directly affects the health of the fish. In fact, it is found that 26% of production loss in the industry happens due to diseases and poor management of the pond. This data is not averaged over all the sub-divisions, and the severely affected ones are small-scale farmers who incur huge losses.

Now, What are the farmers doing about monitoring their water quality?

Mostly, a lot of decisions are taken by guesswork and gut feelings, which highly affects the production.

Some farmers employ aquaculture consultancies to test the water quality. But these services come at heavy fees of 30,000 rs. per year. Even after paying them, farmers are not able to check the water quality at optimum frequency. Alternatively, high-end products do exist, but they cost around 15-20 lakhs rupees, which is more than 10-15 years of income for fish farmers.

Hardware Prototype built by our team

Solution:

But in a real application, it is only important to know whether the parameters have crossed their threshold value or not and notify the farmer, so we are building a product that keeps noting that parameters cross the limit value or not, and we are building it at a very, very low price and this is finflow.

The existing high-end solution provides precise values that are not practically needed by these farmers. On the contrary, we are building a solution that will provide the required values at a very cheap cost.

This is where Finflow comes in. It is an IoT-enabled smart pond monitoring device. Finflow is portable and can be integrated with the pond's current infrastructure.

It gives real-time status Directly on the farmer's phone. It also suggests necessary steps to take when a parameter deviates from standard values. All of this is done by hardware and software counterparts of Finflow.

Working

To see a working prototype model of Finflow. Click here 📽️

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