In a country showing imminent technological progress and yet not working on how it would bring about long-term solutions, a group of four friends (from International Institute of Information Technology) with diverse engineering backgrounds, pursuing their masters course in Geo-informatics, realised the need to give back to the society they were a product of. KAIINOS, dealing with participatory GIS, makes use of community-driven spatial data that ensures more preparedness for groups organising various conservation activities. This has the nine-member team of KAIINOS (including its directors Mahendra Pullata, Kaushik Gampa, Gowtham Gollapalli, K S Rajan) come up with algorithms that help track land changes for agricultural purposes, besides ensuring maximal efficiency of watersheds.
One of its directors, Kaushik Gampa, tells us, “We wanted to be a startup that strived to make a large-scale social impact. India continues to be an economy that’s largely driven by agriculture, with water and forest conservation being integral elements of it. Our basic foundation was to conserve our natural resources. It’s gratifying to see NGOs showing immense interest in this arena; our advisor Rajan’s ideas too were of great help to begin with.”
For the project they’re collaborating with the government and many NGOs in the context of the Western Ghats, they were able to gather years of collated data with regard to vegetation, climate patterns, through an open data satellite system. These patterns have been of immense benefit to farmers, to know what crops work best for an ongoing climatic pattern. They have been equally successful with their tie-up with Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) — for watershed efficiency, Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Forest Survey of India (FSI) — they built data models for decision support here. Of all their projects, the one that has attained utmost significance is the tie-up with the Telangana Government for Mission Kakatiya — where KAIINOS spatial data was critical in understanding the condition of water bodies in the region, and how one could rejuvenate the tanks and their water-holding capacity.
All of their projects are done on open source — for they would have otherwise ended up spending several lakhs on licences. The open-source approach helps customise data patterns and analytics according to a client. “Our association with IIIT through its incubation programme, Tech4Social, gave us the right access to opportunities. What we don’t look for is an investor base; we prefer collaborations,” Kaushik adds. The challenge for KAIINOS remains to stand out in providing unique analytics through their spatial database, while they would need adequate NGO support to make inroads in a startup-heavy market.
Key projects
* Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA)
* Wildlife Institute of India (WII)
* Forest Survey of India (FSI)
* Mission Kakatiya
* Conservation of Western Ghats
