…Unleashing the Power of Mobile in the Hands of Farmers
Dec 14, 2015
…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