…Unleashing the Power of Mobile in the Hands of Farmers

MULTITUDE OF ICT INITIATIVES

Background

Agricultural huge information is available on the web.

Three magic figures : 800….80….8 800 websites

80 DAC - websites

8 organizations

Every department is having its own website, portal and forum.

Most of the available information is in English

Can a farmer access this ‘Web’ of information

Answer is :

What to do now?

Integrated Portal – Farmers’ Portalwww.farmer.gov.in

Farmers’ Portal

An integrated portal from the stand point of a farmer converging elements from 800 plus websites and giving information about :

Dealers (seed, fertilizer, pesticide, machinery)

Government schemes & subsidy

Location of Storage Godowns

Daily Market Price of commodities

Drill down approach from state down to block level.

Databases integrated from different sources and displayed as per farmers’ need.

Currently available in English & Hindi and planning to launch it in all regional languages.

Kisaan Call Centres

Aim is to reach at least one third the farmers households, once in an year.

Total 1.60 crore calls registered at KCCs since inception.

Call barging and 100% call recording facility.

SMS to caller farmers providing a gist of advisories given to them on phone in local language

Voice mail system for recording farmer’s queries with provision for call back.

Facility of video conferencing for upgradation of skills of KCC agents.

Full Involvement of State Governments, KVKs and SAUs in Call Escalation Matrix & Training

Integration of KKMS (www.dackkms.gov.in) with CSCs (www.csc.gov.in)

India is now world’s 3rd largest Internet user, but only 4.6% of rural India has accessed internet once in their life.

Majority of users have used it

primarily as a source of

entertainment and communication.

As per TRAI data, 38 crore mobile phones in rural

areas.

While awareness of services is

relatively high, usership is low due to infrastructural availability and

knowledge.

Origin of mKisan

mKisan

151 crore messages and nearly

1 lac advisories

Huge Response through Pull SMS Services

Integration of

Departmental Services across the

country

IVRS & Voice

Messages started

Flurry of movement

under USSD

A Pervasive & Efficacious Journey so far… Started with SMS advisories when it was inaugurated by the Hon’ble President of India.

More than 1 lac advisory / information count 56 crore messages and around 1.80 billion

SMSs have been sent to farmers throughout the length and breadth of the country by

thousands of officers & experts down to the Block.

Moved to :

Ksewa : Integration of stand alone and web applications with mKisan.

Rating Mechanism

Pull Service

Voice Advisories

IVRS to get feedback from farmers regarding advisories and answers given by KCC

agents.

USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) to facilitate farmers to get information

on mobile without internet.

Integration of Web – Mobile – Kisan Call Centres – Common

Service Centres

SMS Advisories

All 3 Departments of Ministry of Agriculture, IMD,

SAUs, KVKs and State Governments’ officials are

experts in our system.

As of now, 70 lac farmers have been integrated – potential to

reach 8.93 crore farmer households.

Dissemination of information and advisories to farmers in

their own languages free of cost.

To avoid duplication & contradiction, IT enabled checks and

search facility

Content based on farmers’ location & priorities of crop /

agricultural practices.

Easy Phonetic Typing Tools for 12 Indian languages.

New Features: Delivery Report, Supervisory Control and rating

of messages by superiors, User Feedback, Graphical

Dashboard, Text to Speech Conversion.

Integration with e-taal

Transactions on eTaal16

Graphical Drillable Public Dashboard

Ksewa – Universal Plugin

From stand alone or web applications to integrate with SMS.

Soil Health Card, Market Information, Subsidy Information,Dealer Licensing etc.

Earlier, the report was either on the internet or as a printed document.

> 4 mobile phones per farm family, SMS is the way.

Interface to send the report of these services on the mobile phone of the

farmers with a sender id KRISHI

Services through Pull SMS

Voice based Advisories

Surveys indicated that many farmers are interested in

Voice based advisories.

Supports almost all voice formats

(.wav, .mp3,.mp4,.amr,.m4a,.aac,.flac )

Expert can record advisory and upload it on web to send

to farmers through SMS Portal.

Thus illiterate and semi literate farmers can also get the

expert advisories

Work going on for Text to Speech Conversion without

Internet

IVRS in AgricultureIVRS to get feedback of farmers regarding the advisories from experts and quality of information given to them by KCC agents.

We are having IVRS in all 12 Indian languages.

A farmer can rate the advisory or answer given by KCC agent on the scale of 1 to 5.

THE USSD MAGIC… USSD is interactive text messaging. mKisan has catalysed demand

Remote location data entry and query on databases by text messaging

Mandi price data entry, choice of right machine, seed availability, agromet advisory Android Apps in pipeline

Dial *491*105*2# from a Registered Mobile

Buyer Seller Platform

Buyer Seller Coordination

Buyer Registration & Approval

Selection of Area to buy commoditie

s

Price offered for selected commoditie

s

Location of

Farmers

Details of interested buyers along with

their offered price is sent to farmers