Who you work with#
Project Chitoor is a rural development project working across roughly 20 clusters with around 50 ground workers and about 250 families. It has three parts: farming and processing, education, and environment.
Its legal entity, exact location and funding structure are not set out here. Establish them before you design anything that touches money.
The situation#
The project wants to open a funding channel where a company or an individual pays to plant a tree and, in a meaningful sense, owns it. Companies with CSR obligations need reporting they can put in front of an auditor. Individuals need something that feels real.
What is going wrong#
Tree donation schemes have a credibility problem, and it is deserved. Many amount to a certificate and a stock photograph. A donor has no way to check that a specific tree was planted, is still alive, or was not sold to three other donors.
The project cannot fix this by sending updates by hand. With 50 ground workers already stretched, a scheme that needs a staff member to photograph each tree each quarter will die in its first year.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Verifying that a specific tree in a field is alive is genuinely hard and genuinely boring. Satellite imagery cannot resolve one sapling. GPS drifts by metres. Tags fall off, fade, and get eaten. And whatever you design has to be done by a farm worker with a phone in one hand, at scale, for years, without anyone reminding them.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — CS, IT, with room for Electronics students on the sensing side.
- Technical skills — Payment and workflow automation, mobile data capture, offline sync, geolocation, image verification, scheduled reporting, audit trail design.
- Other skills — Designing for people who will not be trained, thinking about how a system gets gamed, understanding what an auditor needs.