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ECOSYSTEM FOR DELIVERING VOICE-BASED
AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION SERVICES TO RURAL INDIA
Himadri Das1, Mikko Ruohonen
2, Markku Turunen
3, Gururaj
Mahajan4 and Juhani Linna
5
Submitted as
Workshop/Interactive Paper
to
The 29th Euro-Asia Management Studies Association Annual Conference
31 October to 3 November 2012
National University of Singapore
Please do not cite without authors’ permission!
1 Corresponding author: International Management Institute, B-10 Qutab Institutional Area, Tara
Crescent New Delhi 110016 India, email: [email protected] 2 University of Tampere, email: [email protected]
3 University of Tampere, email: [email protected]
4 University of Tampere, email: [email protected]
5 University of Tampere, email: [email protected]
Ecosystem for Delivering Voice-based Agricultural Information Services to
Rural India
Abstract
The market potential at rural India’s Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) is huge. The BoP consumer is
illiterate and poor but they have access to mobile phones. This suggests that the mobile phone can
be used as a channel to deliver services to the BoP. Given that a large proportion of rural India’s
BoP are farmers, agricultural information services are an important bouquet of services that would
be useful. These services, however, have to be purely voice-based and cannot involve text of any
kind as the consumer at the BoP can neither read nor write. Spoken web technology developed by
IBM Research Labs can be used for developing voice sites on the line of web sites on the World
Wide Web. Voice sites can be interactive with content being in audio form and the consumer of the
content accessing it using voice commands. Language technology companies will be an important
component of this service delivery ecosystem in their role of langauge translation and voice
synthesis. The other important component of the service delivery ecosystem will be firms that will
deliver the agricultural information services to the consumer without directly charging anything for
it as the rural BoP consumer cannot afford to pay for these services. These firms will have to
develop innovative business models where they can make sustainable profits through commerce for
associated products that anyway have a market with these rural BoP consumers.
1. Introduction
A large market opportunity exists for businesses to create significant economic value by innovating
the design of products and services to more effectively serve the needs of the lowest income
segments of the population in emerging economies. This is especially true in the high population
emerging markets of China, India and increasingly in Africa. Innovations for the emerging markets
can become more attractive through the process of reverse innovation (Govindrajan & Ramamurti
2011), where new products developed for emerging markets are later introduced in the developed
markets. This phenomenon helps to build strong business collaboration between developed and
emerging markets.
The term bottom of the pyramid (BoP) was coined to describe the very poor and economically
deprived who have an unmet need for products and services that can be profitably exploited by
businesses (Prahalad and Hart, 2002). In this paper we focus on the opportunity that exists for
businesses to deliver agricultural information services to the BoP market in India. This market
segment is mostly in rural India, which is difficult to reach compared to urban India. The total
population of India is 1.21 billion with a break up of 833 million from rural India and 377 million
from urban India
(http://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/censusinfodashboard/stock/profiles/en/IND_India.pdf). This
indicates a huge 69% to 31% rural to urban skew. Poverty continues to be an issue in India in spite
of the high growth of the economy in the last several years. The Government of India defines Below
the Poverty Line (BPL) as an economic benchmark and poverty threshold to indicate economic
disadvantage and to identify individuals and households in need of government assistance and aid.
The total BPL population of India is 302 million with a break up of 221 million from rural India and
81 million from urban India (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=44102). Expressed as a
percentage of the total population, the BPL population is 25% on an all India basis, 27% in rural
India, and 21% in urban India. The BPL rural to urban skew is larger at 73% to 27% as compared to
that for the overall population. The true bottom of the pyramid market size is, therefore, 302 million
with 221 million of this in the difficult to access rural India.
The poor are vulnerable by virtue of lack of education, lack of information, and economic, cultural,
and social deprivations (Karnani 2007). Accessibility to this large rural bottom of the pyramid
market is a huge challenge specially for services. The distribution channels for products have been
established with large investments by some of the large consumer product companies but services
have been a hitherto more or less unexplored category for this market. A notable exception to this
service drought in rural India has been telecommunication services. Mobile phone penetration in
India, in general, and rural India, in particular, has been growing at a breakneck pace. The total
number of mobile phone connections in India is 919.17 million with 595.90 million connections in
urban India and 323.27 million connections in rural India. (http://www.trai.gov.in/ ). This higher
share of urban subscribers at 65% as compared to the lower share of rural subscribers at 35% is
because mobile connectivity was originally rolled out exclusively in urban centers as that was
where the purchasing power existed for the then expensive service. As the service prices have
dropped drastically the market in rural India has now opened up and that is where the growth is
much higher than that in urban India. Every month 8 million new mobile connections are added
across India at a monthly growth rate of 0.88%. This is made up of 1.79 million new connections in
urban India at a monthly growth rate of 0.30% and 6.21 million new connections in rural India at a
monthly growth rate of 1.96% (http://www.trai.gov.in/ ). It is expected that by 2013, the number of
mobile phone subscribers will be 1 billion. The national mobile connection teledensity is 70.23 with
an urban teledenisty of 154.18 and a rural teledenisty of 34.13. What appears to be a comparatively
low rural teledenity for mobile connections is very misleading in terms of a measure of the power of
the mobile phone for accessing the rural market. This is because in rural India the mobile phone is
not a personal device like in urban India but a shared device across the entire family. This makes
the addressable market size using mobile phones larger than that suggested by the teledenisty
figures.
Typically value added services through mobile phones have been delivered through text and web
platforms. Both of these require the service consumer to be literate. Whereas literacy is a given in
developed markers for mobile value added services, it is not the necessarily the case in the rural
India bottom of the pyramid market segment. The illiteracy rate in India is 26%, with 31% illiteracy
in rural India and 15% illiteracy in urban India.
(http://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/censusinfodashboard/stock/downloads/Profiles_6/PDF/IND_
6.pdf). It is no coincidence that the illiteracy rate in rural India (31%) and the BPL population in
rural India (25%) are similar in numbers. In this rural India BPL segment poverty and illiteracy go
hand in hand. It is, therefore, safe to assume that essentially the entire 221 million rural India
bottom of the pyramid population is illiterate. Illiteracy makes text base and web based service
delivery platforms unusable. This creates a need for services that can be delivered on a voice
platform instead of text or web.
The abject poverty at rural India’s bottom of the pyramid make the conventional business model
untenable where the mobile phone subscriber pays for value added services consumed. The
dichotomy is that the need to consume services exists at the bottom of the pyramid but the ability to
pay for these services does not. This requires an innovative business model where the service
provider pays for the services instead of the consumer and in a manner such that the service
provider generates profits in doing so on a sustainable basis.
2. Background
2.1. Agriculture in India
Agriculture is the main source of occupation in rural India and plays an important role in the Indian
economy. Agriculture has contributed 14.7 per cent of GDP for the year 2010-11 (Economic Survey
2011, Govt. of India). According to the 2011 Indian census, agriculture accounted for 58 percent of
total Indian employment. In order to achieve inclusive growth and attain sustainability in agriculture
and allied sectors, the Government of India is giving huge support to the agriculture sector.
In recent years, a huge demand has been observed from farmers for need based agricultural
information. They are in need of information and support in different stages of farming like
production, processing and marketing (see Figure 1). In spite of this demand, agriculture
information access for farmers is lacking. In rural India, for example, if a farmer is in need for
information on a particular pest, then he must visit the nearest Department of Agriculture office and
then consult the employee concerned to get the required information about the pest. Given the
penetration of mobile phones, the farmer would now like to use this technology to access the
agriculture information at different phases like production, processing and marketing. Such an
agricultural information system that could be accessible through mobile phones is, however, highly
complex in nature and given the large number of crops and their many varieties. Providing the user
the needed information is, therefore, a challenging task.
Figure 1: Agricultural phases and information needed in each stage
2.2. Existing voice-based services
Currently, voice-based services are used successfully in many areas in many countries. They use
wide but varying set of language technology depending on the extent, complexity and environment
of the tasks they are developed for. Typical examples of voice-based services include transport
information services, such as automated train and bus timetable services. The first (automated)
voice-based services were telephone-based interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which used
speech outputs and telephone keys for interaction. These applications are still popular and possibly
the most important examples of widely used commercial voice. Typically, these applications are
designed to replace human operators. Problems with these systems include that the telephone key
pad interface may be awkward and user satisfaction poor, if the service does not match the quality
offered by human operators. On the other hand, these applications can be very useful for users if
they introduce new services which are not possible or affordable with human operators (or in any
Production
Cultivation materials and
practices Yield
Crop protection
Pest Management
Disease Management
Weed Management
Processing
Harvesting
Post Harvesting
Storage
Marketing
Market price information
Local agri-market information
other way). This is exactly the case in rural India, where human-operated services are not viable in
many cases.
The current trend is that the telephone key pad inputs are replaced by speech inputs. This may
promote both greater user satisfaction and cost savings in some application areas. In addition to IVR
applications, many other forms of telephony applications have dominated the field. These include
information services, such as timetable, weather forecasting and banking services, e-mail
applications and voice portals. Most of the well-known commercial applications and research
prototypes fall into this category. When these applications are collected together, they create voice
portals which integrate several applications into a unified speech interface. Conventional voice
portals, however, have several problems in the rural India context, such as that they do not support
user created content, which makes many services impossible. The Spoken Web is a system to
address these challenges, and is the central medium in the ecosystem presented in this paper.
2.3. Spoken Web
Spoken Web, a technology developed by IBM Research Labs India, is designed to deliver data and
information to illiterate people (Agarwal et. al. 2010a). Spoken Web content is stored in the form
of voice-sites instead of text based web-sites. The content is in local dialects, making it much easier
for illiterate people to access this information. Voice-links allow for navigation between voice-sites
using voice commands from a limited permissible vocabulary set. The interconnection of voice-
sites leads to a WWTF or World Wide Telecom Web on the lines of the traditional World Wide
Web (Kumar et. al. 2007). The lack of internet access limits access to the World Wide Web. Voice-
sites can be accessed by dialing a phone number. The much higher access to mobile phone
connections, therefore, makes access to voice sites much easier.
The underprivileged in India, who otherwise have limited access to information, are receptive to
using ICT enabled methods to access information (Kumar et. al. 2008). Using ICT to reach this
segment, though challenging, is possible with appropriate social settings for technology adoption
(Agarwal et. al. 2010b). The falling price of mobile phones has resulted in widespread adoption of
these devices in the Indian rural hinterland across all strata of society and income levels. Artisans
like plumbers, electricians, and carpenters have mobile phones for business reasons to be accessible
to their clients. In a pilot study these artisans have set up voice-sites to give clients information
about their availability, rates, and references (Agarwal et. al. 2008). Another pilot was conducted
for small farmers in rural India using interactive voice-sites for creating a lively social space to ask
questions and provide answers (Patel et. al. 2010). For all users in this pilot this was the first
experience in participating in an online community. The most popular usage of this forum was
asking questions and browsing answers to questions asked by others.
In addition to the target segment of illiterate people, the spoken web is also useful wherever Internet
access is not available. This is still the situation with a majority of the world’s population. For these
people the spoken web with mobile phone access provides the only source of information. The
spoken web supports user generated content creation and dissemination in areas that do not have
internet access. A study conducted on usability in 600 Indian villages over nine months suggests the
importance of locally created content in their own language (Agarwal et. al. 2010c).
Traditionally Human Computer Interface (HCI) research has focused on high end devices owned by
affluent users. For the Spoken Web to work for the rural impoverished masses, high end devices are
out of the question as the only device available is the low end mobile phone. A study using these
simple devices show that richer mobile interfaces can be created that allow for interaction with
audio content through simple audio gestures (Robinson et. al. 2011).
In addition to providing information access to illiterate people, the Spoken Web also provides
information access to the visually impaired. A study with partially blind and completely blind
people showed that the time required to complete a specific task on a voice-site was quite
acceptable and did not necessarily require prior computer skills (Rajput et. al. 2008). Since the rural
India bottom of the pyramid (BoP) also does not have prior computer skills this finding is
encouraging for the effective use of voice sites for content creation and dissemination.
A number of pilots and studies conducted have given encouraging results regarding the viability of
spoken web enabled voice-sites as an alternative to the World Wide Web for those who do not have
Internet access and/or cannot read or write. No commercial application using the spoken web is
known so far but the success of the pilots suggests that commercial applications are possible. This
paper explores the possibility of commercial applications using the spoken web targeted at the rural
India BoP segment.
3. Ecosystem for Service Delivery
The ecosystem is composed of the users (agricultural service consumers), domain knowledge
expert, the Spoken Web platform, voice-based applications built on the Spoken Web platform,
companies delivering the services using these applications, and the research teams designing the
structural relationships between the different players. This involves Indian and Finnish players,
making it an international ecosystem.
The users are Indian farmers in the BoP. The domain knowledge expert is University of
Agricultural Sciences Dharwad (UASD), a top notch agricultural research university in India. The
Spoken Web platform is developed by IBM Research Labs in India. The voice-based applications
on the Spoken Web platform will be developed by Finnish MSMEs, given their expertise in voice-
based systems in their work in the Nokia centric ecosystem in Finland. The companies delivering
the services will be Indian companies that serve the agricultural market. The research teams are
based at the University of Tampere (UTA) in Finland and the International Management Institute
(IMI) in India. Figure 2 shows the entire ecosystem with all its players.
Figure 2: Indian and Finnish players in the Voice-based Agricultural Information Ecosystem
The critical success factors for this ecosystem to be vibrant will be the acceptability of this service
delivery mode with the agricultural service consumers, the ability of the Finnish MSMEs to develop
voice applications in the Spoken Web platform, and a business model that will be sustainable in the
long run to continue delivering these services. The following is an assessment of these three critical
success factors.
3.1. Acceptability with Agricultural Service Consumer
A preliminary field study was conducted to understand acceptability of this service delivery mode
with the farmers. This field study was carried out in the northern villages of the state of Karnataka
in India. A prototype voice site with agricultural information content was designed and
implemented in order to obtain usability and acceptability feedback from farmers. A total of 51
farmers were interviewed out of which 35 were men and 16 were women. This sample included the
following categories of farmers:
Marginal farmer (holds below 1 hectare of land)
Small farmer (holds 1-2 hectares of land)
Medium farmer (holds 2-4 hectares of land)
Large farmer (holds 4 and above hectares of land)
The key findings of the field study conducted on the sample of 51 farmers were as follows.
All farmers liked the prototype and its approach to delivering agricultural information
services.
A particularly attractive feature of the service was that it was in the local dialect that made
understanding easy.
The other existing sources of agricultural information are elders in the family, radio and
television. Radio and television do not have the advantage of information on demand that
the voice site provides.
Most of them are aware of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) services. They use them
mostly for downloading ringtones for their mobile phones and to check the talk-time
currency available on their mobile phone. They are also use IVR to access agricultural
information from the agricultural help lines. Getting used to a voice site was, therefore, not a
significant transition.
46 out of the 51 farmers said they cannot afford to pay for these services and would like
these services could to be given free of cost. These were marginal, small and medium
farmers. 5 out of the 51 farmers said they were willing to pay a small monthly subscription
charge for the service. These were large farmers. It, therefore, appears that for this service to
be consumed it must be given free of cost.
3.2. Language Technology MSMEs in Finland
In a Finnish context, a qualitative study was conducted among eight MSME’s that operate in the
field of human language technology and develop their own products. Language technology is a field
of that aims in getting computers to perform useful tasks that involve human language, for example,
in human-machine communication or meaningful processing of text or speech (Jurafsky and Martin,
2008).
Mobile and language technology companies in Finland are in general highly developed in the
technological sense. This is mainly due the advanced education system and the immense direct and
indirect impact that Nokia Corporation had on the business sector especially during the decades
before and after the millennium. In spite of this, the key group of MSME’s that operate in the field
of language technology and develop and govern their own products consists of only a handful of
companies. This is mainly due to confined markets in Finnish language and difficulties in market
entry for other market areas.
A total of 8 MSMEs were interviewed and based on this it was not possible come up with a typical
MSME in language technology in terms of a common company profile. The activities of the 8
MSMEs represent, for example, machine translation, speech synthesis, speech recognition, proof
reading and text analysis for various purposes. The number of staff ranged from 2 to a couple of
dozens, and revenue from under 100 000 Euros to a few million Euros. Both staff size and revenue
fluctuate quite a bit in most companies. While it is difficult to analyze all of the reasons behind this
fluctuation, it can be safely said that the development phase the company is in with its product or
products has a significant effect on the financial situation of the company as well as the staff
composition. The product catalogues were built around one concept in the smallest of the
companies, but the largest company had a full range of language services from translation and
consultancy services to a palette of software. The downturn of 2008 and the chronic uncertainty in
the European economy, the most important market area for these companies, have evidently had a
negative impact on product and service demand.
In order for the Spoken Web to become a truly successful and widespread system, it needs
commercial service providers, commercial application developers, and commercial language
technology companies to do reasonable business on the platform. While Spoken Web is a highly
promising platform both in terms of technology and application development potential, it needs
language technology companies to be able to deliver voice-based services in multiple languages.
Technical future development areas include the infrastructure itself (hosting the Spoken Web
applications), the language palette (more languages are needed), navigation (due to its sequential
nature, voice content can be arduous to navigate) and multimodality support (Agarwal et. al. 2010a;
Kumar et. al. 2010). While languages are different, the majority of the technical challenges that
relate to the use of natural language are universal. Companies that have expertise in some areas of
language technology are likely able to contribute on the development of Spoken Web with
reasonable efforts, regardless of their country of origin or existing selection of languages.
In the voice-based agricultural information services ecosystem the Finnish the language technology
companies in Finland will have an important role of building on the Spoken Web architecture. In
particular, machine translation services for new languages are needed. For example, a weather
information service that mines English or Hindi information (mother content or mother text) needs
to translate that information to local Indian languages in order to be viable. Further, an acoustic
modeling for every used language is needed for the speech synthesis to be serviceable. The Census
2001 suggests that Bengali (82 million speak as mother tongue), Telugu (74), Marathi (71), Tamil
(61), Urdu (51), Gujarati (46), Kannada (38), Malayalam (33), Oriya (33) and Punjabi (28) are the
most common mother tongues after Hindi spoken in rural India and, therefore, the most applicable
launch languages for the voice-based agricultural information services.
3.3. Business Models
A demand for certain types of agricultural services exists in the rural India BoP even though the
consumers of these services do not have the capacity to pay. It, therefore, is necessary to innovate
and create business models where these services can be profitably delivered on a sustainable basis
without charging the consumer for it. This requires Indian service provider companies to build
innovative business models around the delivery of these services to generate their profits. The
following are the specific agricultural services farmers need and our proposed business models that
can be used to deliver them. Figure 3 shows these business models in terms of sustainable cash
flows that can make them profitable for all concerned.
3.3.1. Agri-commodity prices and weather
The farmers need to know the prices of agri-commodities they produce so that they can ascertain a
fair price at which they should sell their crops after harvest. Currently they are completely at the
mercy of the price offered by the middleman who buys from them and are typically exploited.
Farmers also need weather information as this often affects their decisions on irrigation as well as
harvest. If scarcity of rainfall is forecast then they need to spend money to make arrangements for
irrigation. If heavy rains are forecast that could destroy their crops close to harvest time, they can
consider an early harvest to save the crops.
The companies from the food processing industry can run voice sites giving price information as
well information on how to sell the agri-commodities at that price. These companies can then dis-
intermediate the supply chain and buy directly from farmers. This will lower the procurement price
for the food processing companies and increase the farmers’ realization from the farm produce by
being able to sell at a price higher than at what they sold to the middlemen. The lower procurement
prices for the food processing companies will increase their profitability. The food processing
companies can also run voice sites to provide weather information to help farmers take decisions on
what they should sow and when they should harvest to optimize the price realization from their
efforts. Weather information coupled with price of agri-commodities will help farmers make more
informed and better decisions.
3.3.2. Seeds
Farmers need information on the alternatives they have in the choice of seeds for the crops they
plan to grow. The usage of right seeds goes a long way in increasing farm yields and growing the
right quality that can fetch higher prices. Farmers are often not aware of the full range of seeds
available and the developments that have occurred in high yielding seeds.
The companies from the seed industry can run voice-sites giving information as to what seed is
relevant depending on the crop and the type of soil. In the process the seed company can promote
their sales.
3.3.3. Pesticide
Attack of crops by pests can completely ruin a farmer. At the first signs of a pest attack, farmers
need immediate information about the appropriate pesticide to use to nip things in the bud.
Preventive pesticide usage is, unfortunately, often not possible because of the poverty these farmers
at the BoP live in.
The companies from the pesticide industry can run voice-sites giving information as to what
pesticide is relevant to which crop disease. In the process the pesticide company can promote their
sales.
3.3.4. Fertilizer
Farmers need information on crop specific fertilizer usage to optimize yields. Overuse of fertilizers
is a waste of money as well at times toxic for the next crop that may be sown in the same field as
different crops require different types of fertilizers.
The companies from the fertilizer industry can run voice-sites giving information as to what
fertilizer is relevant depending on the crop and the type of soil. In the process the fertilizer company
can promote their sales.
3.3.5. Agricultural equipment
With the advantages of mechanization becoming obvious to farmers, they need information on what
agricultural equipment is relevant in different phases of a crop life cycle. Since they cannot afford
to buy and own these equipments, they have to resort to renting them. For this, in addition to
knowing which equipment to use, they also need to know fair rental rates.
The companies from the agricultural equipment rental industry can run voice-sites giving
information as to what agricultural equipment is relevant depending on the phase of the crop life
cycle and also provide current rental rates. In the process these companies can promote their rental
business.
4. Discussion
The language technology companies in Finland are not Spoken Web application developers as such,
but exploratory research suggest that language technology companies that are also Spoken Web
application developers do not exist anywhere at the moment. For these language technology
companies it is necessary to work with local talent when developing solutions for a new language.
Further, the procedure of employing or outsourcing needed software engineers in the development
stage of a new product or feature is common in this business. This means that if a company has a
deep understanding about the use of natural language in software, building a component for the
Spoken Web ecosystem, whether it is a technical feature, a new language or a full-blown
application like a voice site, is a matter of coordination for the most part. This is of course assuming
that the resources are adequate and a clear business case exists.
A key challenge is going to be in the multiple language requirements to service the Indian rural BoP
segment. It may not be possible to have all local dialect but at least the official languages of each
major state will be necessary to cover a significant portion of the market. The mother content would
preferably be in text form in any one language with machine language translation at the text level
and then voice synthesis from text to voice in the different languages being critical success factors
for the successful delivery of agricultural information services.
5. Conclusions
A distinct opportunity exists for delivering agricultural information services to farmers in rural
India’s BoP. These services have to be voice-based as the consumers can neither read nor write. In
addition, they also have to be delivered for free as the rural BoP consumer cannot afford to pay for
it. Since the consumers have mobile phones, these voice-based services can be delivered through
mobile phones. The Spoken Web technology developed by IBM Research Labs in India supports
voice sites through which a user can navigate using voice commands. The success of Nokia has
resulted in the establishment of language technology companies in Finland that have developed
expertise in machine translation and voice synthesis that are important for scaling up voice content
across multiple languages spoken in India. A vibrant ecosystem to deliver agricultural information
services to rural India’s BoP will require IBM India’s Spoken Web platform, language technology
companies in Finland, and companies in India who will deliver the agricultural information services
to the rural BoP consumer. A critical success factor for the viability of this ecosystem will be the
ability of the Indian companies to deliver services without charging anything for it but instead
developing innovative business models that can generate sustainable profits through commerce of
associated products that have demand in the rural BoP market segment.
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