Thrissur: "Apne baare mein bolo," Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Sudha Devadas at the convention of 'Lakhpati Didis' (Millionaire Sisters) at Maharashtra's Jalgaon on August 25. "I told him about myself and our self-help group 'Prakriti'. Now everyone knows me as a drone pilot," said Sudha Devadas (51), a CPM member of Kuzhur grama panchayat in Thrissur district.

Sudha is among the 49 Kudumbashree-supported women from Kerala trained to fly agri-drones in Chennai, as part of the Union government's 'Drone Didi Yojana'. "A 63-year-old woman from Palakkad was the eldest in our group. The youngest was a 30-year-old," she said.

The 15-day training programme -- provided in batches in Chennai, Pune, and Gurugram -- intends to create a drone workforce for modern farming and boost the income of rural women. After the training, the Union government also provided them with a drone -- one for each self-help group -- with a payload capacity of 10kg.

After the training in Chennai, Kudumbashree -- the state government's poverty alleviation mission -- gave another five-day training on handling liquid fertilizers and pesticides at the Central Tuber Crops Research Institute in Thiruvananthapuram. "It is not just about flying the drone, which is easy if you know how to use an Android phone. But we have to know the types of fertilisers and pesticides, their right quantities and time of application," she said.

A drone would take 15 minutes to spray fertiliser on a one-acre paddy field, she said. Manually, it would take around one hour. "Kudumbashree asked us to charge Rs 400 per acre," she said.

Sudha said she learned to fly a drone after the Union government gave her food producer organisation (FPO) -- Mahila Rice Producers Company in Mala -- a drone in the financial year 2022-2023. "We did not know how to use it," she said.

Then the Kudumbashree's Thrissur District Mission Coordinator Dr Kavitha A asked Sudha, a director of the FPO, to learn how to fly the drone to become a truly "women-owned drone unit". In November 2023, the Fertilizers and Chemicals Travancore Limited (FACT), the coordinator for the Drone Didi scheme, called for applications to train members of self-help groups as drone pilots. FACT is a central PSU under the Union Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers. "Three women from each of the 14 districts were selected for the training," she said.

They have now asked Kudubashree to provide three extra sets of batteries for the drone because the in-built one has a life of only 18 minutes. "We are expecting the first call from farmers in December and we cannot go to the fields with just one set of batteries," she said. One set of batteries costs around Rs 50,000.

Being the drone pilot was not the only reason why she was selected to the Lakhpati Didi convention in Jalgaon.

Sudha is the director of the Mahila Rice Producers Company which sells value-added rice products such as rice flour, broken rice, beaten rice and puffed rice. Its annual turnover is now around Rs 12 lakh and is recovering towards the pre-COVID levels when it crossed Rs 25 lakh.

The Mahila FPO was formed in 2019 with money raised from 500 women from five panchayats under the Mala Block. These women are part of various Kudumbashree self-help groups with an interest in agri-business.

Sudha's self-help group Prakriti has 12 members and it has two joint liability groups (JLGs), Gramika and Bhoomika, each with six members. "We started Prakriti and the two JLGs in 2011, and they have always stood the 12 of us in good stead, whether it’s educating our children, building houses, or supporting our children's marriages," she said. "Our lifestyle has changed in the last 13 years," said Sudha, whose elder son is an MTech graduate and younger son is a BTech graduate. "This August my elder son went to Canada and the younger one is doing an MBA in Poland. I remember the days when I invested all the money I got from selling rice products to fund their education," she said. "All the members of our group have similar success stories," she said.

On January 6, the 12 members of Prakriti took an IndiGo flight to Bengaluru and returned the same day. There was an offer of Rs 6,000 for a round-trip ticket. The women shelled out another Rs 2,000 each for touring the city's zoo and parks. "We were getting old and wanted to travel on a flight. But we decided to return the same day because some of our husbands are not keeping well and need us around," she said.

Surely, Modi's 'apne baare mein bolo' is a question that gives wings to women empowerment, much like his 'Drone Didi' scheme.