Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates to Visit Odisha On 28th February

Bhubaneswar: Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates will visit Odisha on the 28th of this month. According to reports, Bill is scheduled to arrive in Bhubaneswar on 28th February and pay a visit to Krushi Bhawan. He will discuss about the Odisha Government’s initiatives on farmer development and particularly about their financial inclusiveness.

Bill Gates, in his Blog on Linkedin wrote about his visit to Odisha. He wrote “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.”
He also wrote, “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 systems.”

“This week, I’ll visit a low-income community in Odisha where a government program is helping women get the skills to fulfill government construction contracts. Since 2018, this program has helped 22,000 groups of women deliver on more than 52,000 projects including building roads, drains, and toilets”, he wrote in his blog.