Mobile Harvest

Can mobile phone apps be designed to help make a better world? Life Apps challenges young software developers from around the world to visit remote communities, to experience their everyday hardships and create app solutions to improve their lives – a ‘life app’.

Sachin Gaur inhabits the secret world of India’s high-tech boom. The award-winning software engineer has double masters in computer cryptography and he is also a believer in the power of social media.

He co-founded the company MixOrg, which aims to develop applications that help people at the bottom of India’s society – people like the many millions of India’s small-scale farmers whose lives are often blighted by multiple problems.

Sachin goes to Andhra Pradesh to meet farmers and understand the obstacles they are facing – from changing weather patterns to the rising costs of seeds and fertilisers.

As he talks to the farmers he finds there are answers. Sachin engages not just colleagues in his office, but online communities of programmers to try and develop an application that can help improve the farmers’ lives.

But can an app transform the lives of millions of India’s farmers and help stem the tide of farmer suicides?