India currently has over 840 million mobile subscribers and there are more than 10 million handsets being sold per month. Much of that staggering growth is occurring in rural areas where people are just discovering the power of mobile communications. Keeping this in mind, India’s leading IT firm TCS has come up with an innovative mobile application for farmers. It’s called mKrishi (‘Krishi’ is Hindi for ‘farming’) and it aims to broadcast best farming practices to each farmer.
Through this service, which goes by the name of the Mobile Agro Advisory System, a farmer can receive information about local weather, types of soil, and the kind of fertilizers and pesticides to be used. Such information is telecast via television as well, but it is hardly localized and henceforth turns out to be useless for the farmers.
Farmers in India are generally semi-literate and many of them are illiterate. This service keeps this fact in mind and uses local language interfaces, rich content and media formats, and voice messaging systems.
The initiative has been acclaimed in the media as well as by the farmer community. Amerjeet, a farmer from Punjab noted “It’s an innovation which is transforming the way services are delivered in rural India.”
Farmers will now be able to send their agriculture-related queries to experts in the form of text, voice, and pictures. The expert’s advice is sent to the farmer’s mobile phone after analysis. This application can also be used for collecting real-time agricultural data by the government. The farmers will also have their own mobile phone based social network
known as R-Net.
The information gap that currently exists for rural farmers will likely decrease when this initiative is implemented nation-wide. Better knowledge will lead to more produce, hopefully improving the agriculture industry as a whole. mKrishi will allow farmers to be aware of the latest market prices, and so they will be able to sell their produce at the right price without being duped by middlemen in the system.
Considering that half of the nation’s work-force is comprised of farmers and laborers, the potential benefits from such an initiative are enormous.
TCS mKrishi – Mobile Agro Advisory System
[Photo: Now Public]
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