Meet Pravin Deshmukh, Vidarbha's net-savvy farmer

TRAVEL TO TEACH: Pravin travels to villages holding chaupals and introducing other farmers to the Internet.

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In a CNN-IBN special series Mera Gaon Mera Bandwidth, we are trying to highlight how the Internet is transforming lives in rural India.

Vidarbha: Forty five-year-old Pravin Deshmukh is the new age farmer of Vidarbha. After suffering heavy losses in cotton farming, and incurring huge debts, a desperate Pravin he turned to what he thought had all the solutions - the Internet.

"On the Internet, I found that turmeric is better than cotton. I got so much information, and ideas,” says Pravin.

The journey from cotton fields to turmeric for the net-savvy farmer has truly been an incredible one. He used the worldwide web to come out of the suicide web that cotton farming brings in this part of the world. Pravin is now spreading the good word.

Pravin has doubled his profits in just one year. Now, he travels from village to village, holding chaupals for other farmers and introducing the Internet to them too.

"It's encouraging that it worked for him. Years of cotton farming has only caused suicides. Maybe his technology will change this,” says a cotton farmer, Vishwas Anandrao Pandey.

In the last five years over 3,000 cotton farmers have killed themselves in Vidarbha. Pravin says the Internet didn't just help him make profits. It also saved his life.

(With inputs from Jayesh Jagad in Akola)