Project Proposal

1. Project Background and Justification

We have developed a multilingual online question and answer forum – Almost All Questions Answered (aAQUA) which provides online answers to questions asked over the internet and has been deployed successfully in over 10 kiosks covering 30 villages around the Pabal area in the 3 talukas of Rajgurunagar, Shirur and Haveli. 60 farmers in Pabal and around use aAQUA forums on a regular basis in aAQUA clubs and over 250 users have sent about 400 questions (details in Table 1).

Table 1: Summary of aAQUA question topics

Kiosk operators charge farmers Rs 5 or Rs 10 per query for the consultancy. Almost all of the questions have been answered in the local language (Marathi). Local farmers trust the aAQUA service and are sensitive to the time it takes for the answers to arrive (current average is 2.5 days). The content of aAQUA is available to all at: www.aaqua.org

aAQUA caters to these needs of the farmer in more than one way, by:

How useful can an Internet-based Agri-extension service be to farmers? Why do farmers keep coming back? We have been running such a service for the past one year. The experts in our setup are located more than 200 kilometers away from the farmers and have never interacted with them. So why do farmers keep coming back?

The answer lies in our efforts in securing the trust of the local farmers. The farmers come to the aAQUA farmer clubs because they trust the computer operator and the quality of the answers from KVK Baramati. We are planning on adding additional services for the farmer and increasing the interaction with farmer to enhance the trust that we have built. What is important is to have other linkages between the experts and the farmer – value adding services such as soil testing, farmers visit to KVK, disease forecasting etc.

Our studies have shown that many farmers pose ill-formed and very general questions but expect specific answers (to their context). This may explain why typical agricultural portals and agriculture websites have limited usefulness. Our studies have also shown that most questions asked on the forum are about crop diseases. They are mostly curative, as opposed to preventive since farmers are approaching kiosks only after they have tried everything else. The value adding services have to be designed with this in mind – how do we encourage our farmers to adopt preventive practices that make them less vulnerable to the uncertainties of pest attacks and the crop diseases.

Why provide online disease forecasting services in rural areas? Disease forecasting is done either informally through word of mouth or not at all. In those few cases where it is done formally as in the case of KVK Baramati, the results have been very promising. Specifically, KVK Baramati has been using the disease forecasting equipment for the past one year, and its forecasts have benefited farmers of vine grapes, potato, tomato, citrus and onions. However, the usefulness of the prediction has been limited due to the nature of the input parameters which change from place to place.

Using the requested funds, KVK plans to provide forecasts to farmers by using more sensors in surrounding regions so that the forecasts will be more suitable and accurate for the local region. The costs are reduced by having a network of kiosks (these already exist) to send the data eliminating the need of software licenses and expertise at each kiosk. KVK is also providing content to a local community radio station which can benefit a wider number of farmers.

Using this experience it should be possible to replicate disease forecasting services across the country using the network of KVKs.

What solutions do we propose? Krishi Vigyan Kendra (Baramati) and Vigyan Ashram (Pabal) will train local kiosks in using the disease forecasting device. The kiosk operators will upload the sensors’ data on their PC using Infra Red port (similar to television remotes) and send it to KVK Baramati. The data needs to be sent every 3 days. KVK will interpret the data and disseminate the disease forecasts on the aAQUA portal. This will encourage preventive practices in pest management in addition to the remedial measures for crop and animal diseases in the areas identified. Response times (for questions and forecasts) will be committed to by KVK. The local community radio station available to KVK will also air the forecasts for wider reach.

IIT will provide a software platform for capturing crop and animal related Q&A between farmers and experts with multilingual search features. The solution will include support for content repositories, pictures and multimedia, multilingual search and retrieval (almost all Indian languages are supported). Farmers (and farm information), kiosk operators and experts profiles can be stored for transparency and ease of access. IIT will investigate the issues of data aggregation, cleaning, analysis and modeling and validation of disease forecasts (data mining and validation). A zone coordinator and data analyst person will be hired and posted at each forecasting station.

VA will identify stakeholders and staff in the district to champion the effort. Roles of zone coordinator and data analysts will be defined. Metrics for measuring experts’, coordinators’, field engineers’, kiosk operators’ and farmers’ contributions will be defined.

Why did we choose Pabal and Baramati as our pilot sites? Vigyan Ashram and KVK Baramati both have access to local kiosks that were setup using the corDECT technology by Nlogue. Each of them have more than 20 years of experience in development – the former in non-formal education and the latter in agri-extension. Vigyan Ashram is also providing the internet service in Pabal. We implemented the aAQUA service with KVK and VA as partners from December 2003.

2. Project Objectives

This project will add tremendous value to our existing deployment.

3. Project Beneficiaries

• Farmers in Pune district. The data from the project will be used to plan the establishment of disease forecasting centers at the government level.
• KVK experts will learn to use new ICTs in making disease forecasts.
• Our work will be published on the internet and shared with others implementing Agri-extension services.
• Kiosk operators in Pabal and Baramati.

4. Project Methodology

• Needs assessment in the Pabal and Baramati area and identification of 8 kiosks.
• Training of kiosk operators and signing terms of agreement.
• Modifications in aAQUA for uploading sensor data and disseminating forecasts.
• Study how experts and data analysts spend their time with the intervention.

5. Project Sustainability

We have employed 2 people for this project at Vigyan Ashram and KVK through funds from IIT Bombay. They will continue to remain on rolls as employees of IIT Bombay for at least another 3 years.

The disease forecasts are already being provided by KVK in a limited region. They have the expertise and time to support the additional 8 kiosks.

6. Project Schedule