Selva Murali is the founder and CEO of the Agrisakthi app, which offers farmers with information on goods, insurance, market prices, and other topics. He met Sundar Pichai while participating in Google’s Appscale Academy, which was created in partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
Selva Murali, an entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu’s Mathur town, manages the Agrisakthi app, which offers farmers in Tamil Nadu with information on goods, insurance, market prices, and other topics. Continue reading to find out why Google’s Sundar Pichai met him.
Selva Murali, a small-town entrepreneur in Tamil Nadu who owns an agricultural app, recently met with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, in Delhi.
Selva’s Agrisakthi app is a platform for disseminating knowledge for the benefit of farmers. He also runs Visual Media Technologies, a software firm in Mathur, Krishnagiri district.
How did Selva come upon Sundar?
Google had picked 100 app developers from throughout the nation for a six-month training as part of the activities of Google’s Appscale Academy, in conjunction with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
Selva was one of them, and he was selected to meet Sundar in Delhi. Selva describes the encounter as a surprise, and he had no idea he was meeting Sundar until he did.
An ecstatic
Selva claims Sundar spoke to him in Tamil for more than 15 minutes and recounts his chat with Sundar, during which he provided the Google CEO an overview of Agrisakthi and displayed the app’s functionality.
Selva described his encounter with Sundar as “casual,” with little fanfare. It’s no surprise that Selva, who hails from a farming family, opted to develop an app for farmers.
Selva hails from a farming family and opted to design an app that will aid farmers. The Agrisakthi app, which is accessible on Google Play, informs Tamil Nadu farmers on goods, insurance, nutrition, market prices, and agriculture training.
He explains, “I put the functionalities provided by Google into an application in Tamil.” For example, the Agrisakthi app uses Google’s ‘Voice to Text’ capability in Tamil to aid farmers in the state.
According to Selva, the Agrisakthi app makes cash through advertising. He further claims that his software company’s earnings help him keep the app running.
Is he planning to roll out the app across the country? Selva’s goal is to utilise technology to benefit people.
He recalls, “When Sundar proposed I spread it across the country, I warned him that this would need language translation and more expenditures. He told me I could look into using Google Translate to offer the software in several regional languages while also lowering the cost.”
