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| Overview Our working group is developing an IT Action Plan that proposes to scale up Internet and web-delivered Extension programmes in India. The plan provides rationale and details key players, phases and logistics. The plan is driven by information and communication needs of small farmers and ties to recent Extension initiatives within the National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP) such as ATMA. Broader IT initiatives driven by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) provide an important foundation as well. The initial goal is to create and evaluate a set of village-level Web sites to integrate existing resources for practical use. There are high quality resources for farmer use already online but it is distributed across the sites of government agencies, NGO's and the sprouting dot.coms. Such resources can be integrated in one site to provide single point of contact access to farmers. When needed content is in-hand but not on-line, we can facilitate its posting. The burgeoning ag-related holdings on the Web constitutes a nascent agricultural information system, but impetus is needed to integrate and to expand such holdings. We will partner with private sector concerns when appropriate to achieve our goals. For example, partnerships with dot.coms in Indore and Dehli have been established. Grammandi and Agriwatch will supply feed market prices on a trial basis. DAC already provides market information on their rich and attractive portal but the dot.coms can provide highly localized pricing information in near real-time. Fact sheets on seed varieties, planting tips and soil and pest treatments will be sought to supplement the materials that DAC or ICAR has produced. For example, SOPA has agreed to provide fact sheets on growing soybeans. Project Test Beds When initiating this working group, Dr.Swaminathan suggested that a representative set of locations for test beds within each of the four major eco-regions of India be selected. An appropriate set of village test beds will strengthen the generalizability of our results. The Working Group has begun to select areas and villages for local test beds. We will prototype Web sites portals for each selected locale, evaluate their effectiveness and make changes accordingly. Local portals will deliver practical content to farmers in each selected village. Localized content will include markets, weather, and agronomy fact sheets. The portals will be designed using technologies, language and graphics appropriate for the locality. Control of local portals will eventually transfer to village oversight groups. Ideally too, groups of farmers at block and district levels would coordinate information of mutual importance and capture the efficiencies and synergies at these levels. Some models of community Internet projects provide guidance. For example, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation supports "village knowledge centers" in Pondicherry near Chennai. The TARAhaat portal and Babhaleshwar KVK are excellent examples of rich community Web portals. Our local portals will resemble these existing sites but will be enriched by the integration of all the relevant content and interactive capabilities that can be acquired. Multi-lingual content, rapid download and accessibility provide important guidelines for site design. Farmer decision tools and databases will support practical planting, soil and pest treatments and other needs during the growing season. Indeed, in one sense we aim at the creation of an online "India Agronomy Handbook" that provides practical guidance, decision tools and databases. Coverage of all major crops with attention to local and regional variation would be necessary. A national portal will provide a gateway to the local portals as well as regional and national content. Content from each local portal will be aggregated into a digital library and knowledge-base. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois has offered to provide to provide Knowledge-Management and e-Learning technologies for the national portal prototype. For both local and master portals, our overriding strategy is to integrate available content needed by farmers from both public and private sources. After deploying and marketing the sites, we then must engage the farmers in a thorough evaluation of whether their needs were met and how we can better meet them. Sivakumar (2000) says the farmer asks for four main things: " Knowledge of farm practices, accurate weather information for planning operations, pricing information that helps them buy inputs low, and pricing information to help sell yields high." To insure we are meeting these and related needs, we must truly enlist the collaboration of farmers as partners in the effort. |
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