ASSIGNMENTONROLE OF COMPUTERS IN LIVESTOCK DEVELOPMENT

Submitted to : Submitted by :Dr. B.H.M Patel Dr. Jayant Goyal Senior Scientist( SS ) P-1785 Division of Livestock Production and Managment

INDIAN VETERINARY RESEARCH INSTITUTEIZATNAGAR - 243 1222014

ROLE OF COMPUTERS IN LIVESTOCK DEVELOPMENT

INTRODUCTION Livestock sector in India plays a pivotal role in upliftment of socio-economic and employment generation for rural households. The contribution of agriculture and allied sectors is about 14.20% of total GDP while livestock sector alone is contributing about 32% of agriculture. The use of new Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has revolutionized manufacturing and services the world over. The ICTs include community radio and television, cellular-telephony, computers, digital imaging, the Internet and Wide Area Networking (WAN), Wi-Fi and Mixed Media. In the more developed countries, the use of ICT has become central to improve productivity in agriculture and livestock production especially through its application in precision agriculture and livestock farming. It is of developing effective information systems for planning and monitoring livestock development programmes, improving livestock services and enabling learning for capacity development that use ICT effectively and efficiently. The contribution of livestock sector to Indias economy, livelihoods, food and nutritional security and potential is very essential for further development. This would need more robust planning and monitoring of the livestock sector, the need to make livestock services upto International standards and build capacity across the sector to meet the challenges of global competitiveness in animal production and marketing. Ultimately, India will need to apply new ICTs effectively in improving these systems so that they support meeting each of the above requirements for its livestock sector. The importance of livestock goes beyond its food production function. It provides draft power and organic manure for agriculture and fuel for domestic purpose. Growth in livestock sector is thus reckoned to reduce interpersonal and inter regional inequalities, and alleviate poverty. Thus, ICT initiatives will provide a strong case for effective coverage and dissemination of livestock outreach information to the farming community. Cyber Livestock Extension: Latest Tool of ICTCyber space is the imaginary or virtual space of computers connected with each other on networks, across the globe. Thus computers can access information in the form of text, graphic, audio, video and animation files. Software tools on networks provide facilities to interactively access the information from connected servers (Sharma, 2000). Livestock extension relates to the process of carrying the technology of scientific animal husbandry to the livestock owner to enable him/her to utilize the information in making appropriate decisions to improve the production of animals and thus improve his/her economy. Livestock extension services seek to impart the necessary skills to the farmers for undertaking improved animal husbandry operations, to make available timely information and improved practices in an easily understandable form suited to their level of literacy and awareness and to create in them a favourable attitude for innovation and change (Benor, 1984). Extension is the central mechanism in the livestock development process, both in terms of technology transfer and human resource development (Samanta, 1993). Cyber extension means using the power of online networks, computer communications and digital interactive multimedia to facilitate dissemination of animal husbandry technology.Limitations of Traditional Livestock Extension Methods1. Expensive: It costs a lot of money to produce and print extension materials and to train a whole chain of livestock extension personnel.2. Time Consuming: For a message to pass from a research station/university to the livestock owners, it involves many actors to understand and deliver the message to next layer.3. Message Distortion: A number of evaluation studies of Training and Visit system of extension indicate that the quality of extension messages gets heavily distorted and eroded when it ultimately reaches to the end users.4. Poor Communication Capacity: There may be wide gap between the technologies disseminated from the research laboratories and adopted at the level of end users.5. Neglect of Technology Transfer in Livestock Production: Technology transfer is neglected for livestock production and it can mainly be attributed to; (a) Transmission of information for crop production has been a major priority for most extension services but not livestock production although the demand for livestock products is growing more rapidly than the demand for crops, (b) The focus of animal husbandry extension is on animal health rather than production aspects. It is thus found that the capacity of traditional livestock extension system is very limited and the challenges of reaching all the villages and the livestock owners are becoming more and more difficult (Mathewman and Mortan, 1995).Advantages of New Technology Transfer Method1. Save Money and Time: Scientists can prepare and update electronic versions of messages, FLDs and OFTs results themselves and load into computers which save money and time to reach interested end users instantly.2. Continuous Availability: The key attribute of cyber extension is its availability all the time (24 hours). It can be uploaded at any time as and when required by the end users according to their needs.3. Cut Steps in the Diffusion Process: Cyber outreach will remove a number of steps altogether from the traditional extension process. All the programmes can be eliminated altogether. The information can be directly posted on the Internet, which will be available to extension functionaries and farmers at district, Sub-division, block and village level. All the concerned will get the information immediately and queries/clarification/improvement will also be addressed equally fast without involving a chain of extension functionaries.4. Information Rich and Interactive: It appeals to the interested extension workers and analytical farmers and allows them to search and locate information they need.5. Instant International Reach: Cyber extension method of technology transfer will eliminate the time and distance barrier that get in the way of knowing the latest information on any particular livestock problem from any part of the world and can be discussed with the best scientist/expert in the field.Harnessing ICT for livestock and rural development: Indian casesThere are cases of application of ICT that have made a difference in the delivery of services in rural India. In the Warna Wired Village Project covering 70 villages in Maharashtra, the existing cooperative structure has been used with state-of-the-art infrastructure to provide Internet access to cooperative societies. The aim is to provide information to the villagers by establishing networked booths in the villages. The Information Villages Project of M.S Swaminathan Research Foundation is aimed at bringing the benefits of modern ICTs to rural families in Pondichery. A value addition center, which is the hub of the information network, has been established in Villianur village and four information shops have been established in different villages to deliver a basket of services. In National Dairy Development Board,ICT is being used at milk collection centers and in cooperatives to measure butter fat content of milk, test the quality of the milk and promptly make the payment to the farmers. It has resulted in the removal of incentives to those who adulterate milk, reduced the time for payments from 10 days to less than 5 minutes and instilled the confidence in farmers on cooperative set up. All these factors have helped the milk market to expand to greater dimension (Sharma 2000). The Central Institute for Research on Goats ( CIRG) has developed E-mail Conference System for Goat Outreach on its goat-nic.in server using free software called 'majordoma' which is available on www.greatcircle.com on a free Linux operating system. Three e-mail conferencing systems, viz.,goat-net@cirg.nic.in.,livestock-net@cirg.nic.inandfishnet@cirg.nic.in, have been launched by the institute to help information inflow among technologists, farmers, development officers and planners (Singh and Radhika, 2002). Under Animal Health Project funded by Department for International Development (DFID), Rajiv Gandhi college of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Pondicherry in collaboration with University of Reading, UK, has installed a interactive touch screen information Kiosk in one of the peri-urban region of Pondicherry on a trail basis. It has information on important cattle diseases in addition to management of cattle and methods of acquiring information. Illiterate livestock keepers can access the information with the touch of the screen which had text and pictures with sound back-up.Relevance of cyber livestock outreachHow will ICT be useful to animal husbandry? Does it involve creating databases or decision support systems? How can ICT then be made useful to farmers with smallholdings of 1-2 animals? While deliberating on these issues at the World Science Academies summit, Chennai in1996, it was mentioned that the information age has provided tools such as the Internet and GIS mapping to promote a learning revolution in agriculture and allied activities and outreach information should be disseminated through computer-aided information shops (Kiosks) operated by educated village youth.A large number of IT products and experiments are known in this area. Management of cattle or poultry farms, covering layout of grasslands, feeding, nutrition, forage management, breeding and waste disposal can now be carried out with the help of hypermedia documents, decision support systems or even expert systems. Recent advances in ICT based products provide livestock outreach with the opportunity to revise and update delivery systems. Decision support systems furnish livestock outreach personnel, consultants, allied industries and producers with a new resource to solve problems. Use of relational databases on the livestock farm updated from external databases provides users with a new option for problem solving. Hypertext and authoring languages create new ways to manage more effectively the information available through database. Decision support systems using an on-farm database, can be developed to address and to evaluate more specific livestock management problems. Use of tools that can directly access and manipulate producers' external and internal data increases the efficiency of the livestock outreach personnel.Social consequences of slow adoption of ICTICT can be seen as contributing to the socio-cultural system of rural areas, with impact on both behavior and knowledge. It is believed that ICT will become the prime basis for the future economic development of livestock industry and failure to adopt could cause major problems. The impact of ICT at the community level has a social dimension in which access to information is uneven across the social groups. Information disadvantaged groups are distanced from ICT networks, with the possibility of increased polarization (Gibbs and Tanner 1997). It is believed that this polarization is inevitable, given the personal socio-economic and cultural situation of Indian livestock farmers. The mitigation of this marginalization is a major policy challenge. There is a need for local control over the local information system and reduction in the social inequality of access.Valantin (1996) observed that ICTs are key generative and transformative technologies, which have positive and negative impacts on a range of social issues. This is especially the case when some livestock groups in the population are connected to global information facilities. The danger with low level of adoption of ICT is low social participation, on the one level and social exclusion on the other (Thomas et al 2002). This differentiation can lead to the creation of cosmopolitan and local livestock farmers. There is therefore a need for rationality with regard to the adoption of ICT. Further, slow adoption of ICT in livestock sector may lead to problems with other related sectors having higher adoption rates and consequent fragmentation of the sector. This may happen at both regional and national levels. For the livestock sector and farming communities, there will be external and internal factors which are to be taken into account with the adoption of ICT. External factors include visibility and openness of the policy process, the degree of support for the idea or view point on the adoption of cyber extension, urgency in making a decision, extent of consensus with regard to ICT and the involvement of outside interest groups and their level of interest. Internal factors include the nature and level of interest within the sector and farming communities to the adoption of ICT and the comprehensibility of processes involved. This will involve the relationship of ICT to prevailing social values and concerns. There will be both prudential acquiescence and as well as opposition by those averse to the adoption of such technologies. In order to avoid this, policy-making bodies need to plan the implementation of policies for the use of ICT, if maximum benefits are to be achieved.Silent revolutionA silent revolution is taking place in the communication systems in rural India. Farmers are browsing the Internet and acquiring general, technical and marketing information from the information kiosks. The total coverage under such initiatives may be very small (about one thousand villages out of over six lakh villages in the country), but the potential of ICT in bridging the so-called digital divide is being hotly debated within and outside the country.Livestock rearing continues to be the occupation and way of life for millions of the population in India. The sustainable prosperity of these people is the key for improving the overall human resource development scenario in the country. Livestock rearing in India followed traditional lines until the beginning of Operation Flood in the 1970s. The white revolution gave a boost to the production and productivity of livestock. Quick dissemination of technological information from the livestock research system to end users and feedback to the research stations are critical to the transfer of animal husbandry technology. The information and communication support during the last 50 years has been conventional. The extension personnel of the State Animal husbandry Departments disseminated the technologies to the farmers manually by word of mouth. As a sequel the technologies have not reached the majority of farmers due to vast geography and inherent limitations of the traditional extension. The gap between potential and existing production of livestock remains a challenge even today. Reaching millions of farmers, spread over 600 districts, 5800 blocks and more than 0.6 million villages is an almost impossible task. The diversity of agro-ecological conditions adds to this challenge. The success of white revolution is mainly due to a concerted homogenous livestock extension approach for the area of assured inputs. Now, as we move to address the needs of rain fed ecosystems, wherein, livestock dominates the agriculture and in the context of globalization and world trade agreement, the livestock extension strategy becomes more complex. The needs of livestock keepers are much more diverse and the knowledge required to address them is beyond the capacity of the livestock extension functionaries working in traditional system.