Farmer Advisory ICT System

Telecommunication is likely to bring about meaningful ,large scale, transformation in developing rural areas where infrastructure is limited . IIT has social responsibility in doing this. Farmer Advisory ICT is an experiment in this direction.

Our Vision

India is an agrarian country with around 60% of its people depending directly or indirectly upon agriculture.

Still Farmer suicides accounts for 11.2% of total suicides in India.

One of the major reason for this is “lack of proper dissemination of Important informations” to farmers.

Mobile technologies provide a clear opportunity for sharing and exchanging knowledge more widely and in a more cost-effective way than has previously been possible.

In the agricultural field, the benefits are particularly obvious - where farmers are working in hard-to-reach areas and are geographically spread, support can be provided by extension workers over the phone or by text rather than needing to wait for them to visit the region.

This is where Farmer Advisory System can help the farmers.

Farmer Advisory ICT System

This is an Interactive voice response system which gives farmers a Phone number, calling on which they can address their problem on about a specific topic.

These recorded voice will be then Categorised on basis of topics and will be directed to the expert of that subject who will suggest the solutions to it and it’ll then be redirected to the farmer again.

Farmer Advisory ICT: System Flow

Advice

System Specifications

There are two users of the System:

1. Farmers ( who needs advice for problem redressal)

2.Experts ( Agriculture Institute Professors, other scientists who are expert of a topic)

User Stories

1. Let’s look at an example:

There is a Farmer Ramesh, from village “Hamrapur” in maharashtra . He grows Sugarcane on his fields. But this season he’s worried as despite having a large turnout in sugarcane production, sugar produced from his sugarcane is less. Now he Calls on the Farmer Advisory ICT No. 09227507512.

On calling he selects his topic from menu list and records his problem in his own voice.

From there It gets redirected to the System to the group belonging to that topic say “ Crop Management”.

Now the expert of “Crop Management” Mr. Deepak Suchde when logs in to the system gets this new message and proposes the solution “that sugarcane must be planted at a distance so that their leaves should not come over each other and leaves should be allowed to get sunlight as only then glucose will be formed” directs this message from there to farmer’s number again. He may also send the solution as a video form.

Sample Expert Audios:https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B81Cxgzy-KJPeFZJbW9DeXpLLTA&usp=sharing_eil

Adhale audio part1

Adhale audio part2

Adhale audio part3

Adhale audio part4

User Stories:

Case 2 : Instead of recording and forwarding voice message , Expert wants to send solution in message format .

Solution: Expert can simply write the message in a text box embedded in the system and can simply send the message.

Broadcasting solutions:

User Stories:

Case 3: Expert 2 believes that he has some video link which he think can be useful to the farmers and wants to send it to the farmers.

Solution: Currently the system has a special tab to send video links to the farmers. He can send it from there.But later it’ll acquire a functionality which allows to send videos and viewers will be able to browse them in their phone or system.

Adding video links:

User Stories:

Case 4: Expert while listening to the problem on phone , wants to be in conference to the farmer whom he has to suggest the solution.

Solution: The system has this option of placing a conference call also by which he can call the farmer while listening to his earlier recorded problem.

Case 5 : Some important information need to be broadcasted to a whole group of farmers like “monsoon would be delayed this year” .

Solution: The system offers “broadcast message” functionality using which one can send one message to awhole group of people at the same time.

Groups in Farmer Advisory:

System settings:

Experts in the System:

Members in water Group:

Pictorial Representation of Farmer Advisory System

Advantages from the system

❖ Problem Redressal of the farmers.❖ As the medium is voice based, it gives both

literate and illiterate access to important information.

❖ Even the Experts who are not in India but want to help the people of their country through their knowledge, can use this system to serve their people and country.

❖ This System if extended, cannot just be used for farming advisory but problem redressal for various issues like health, animal husbandry etc.

Other systems similar to Farmer Advisory

There are several other systems similar to Rural IVRS which possess similar functionality as that of Farmer advisory but a lot of features are there to distinguish others from Rural IVRS . Some of such systems are:

1. Awaaz.de

2. IVR Junction

3.A Project from IIT mandi : HemaMurthy Text to Speech System

Farmer Advisory v/s Awaaz.deAwaaz.de is another software which provide hosted voice solutions that help people and organizations engage with communities.

Farmer Advisory Awaaz.de

1.Farmer Advisory allows to communicate in different languages.

1.Awaaz.de allows this only in english.

2.It gives a local number for each state which makes call cost cheap.

2.It provides a unique number for all

3.It is customizable and can be set according to needs of different organisation.

3.It is not so customizable

4.It has option of creating a hierarchy of groups i.e. group inside groups

4.No such hierarchy is possible

Farmer advisory v/s Rural IVR Junction

Rural IVR Junction is another project by Microsoft Research , Which allows to record and broadcast message calling on a number.

Farmer Advisory Rural IVR Junction

1.Apart from Broadcasting, it provides a number of other important features like Group classification, message, placing call at specific time.

1.The Main and only functioning is recording and broadcasting messages.

2.It is customizable. 2. The system and settings are fixed.

3. It is comapatible with regional indian languages also like marathi.

3. Only hindi and english language option is provided

4.You can also give your response/feedback etc.

4.Only messages are recorded which are meant to be broadcasted.

Farmer Advisory v/s AQUAAqua is a web based query answering system that helps farmers with their agricultural problems .

Aqua Farmer Advisory

1. They charge Rs. 10 for each query from farmers.

2.It provides free assistance.

2.No speech support, only text 2.Both speech and text

PRI Service

Currently we are using KooKoo Service as our telephony service, but It doesn’t allow our system to place call on DND(do not disturb) numbers .

We are planning to use PRI(primary rate interface) services which will remove this barrier . It’s service Costs around 30,000 per month, which for 2 years will cost around 7.2 lakh.

Our Concerns….

Our concern is not technology but “the people” who usethis technology. So our effort is to provide genuine and relevant information to those who don’t have access to these . Technology is an important tool for achieving this.Indian farmers face a no. of problems in their job and there are experts who know the scientific and technical solutions to this , this system simply connects both !!

❏ Adhale is a village on the outskirts of Pune, and the village community is very motivated to make positive changes in their lifestyle, educational upliftment, agricultural practices etc.

❏ The main motive of the 3 days summer camp was to enrich the leadership qualities among the rural area school childrens.

❏ It included -

1. Activities by experts like lend a hand2. Arvind Gupta toys3. Personality development programme 4. Presentation on Rural innovations and 5. Spiritual talks for positive motivation.

1.Adhale Summer Camp

Day 1 : Presentation from Lend a hand by Mr. Prabhakar Patil and field study of Rainfall prediction by experts

Day 2 :Interaction session between the faculty and Demo with Interaction session from Educational Toys by Mr. Arvind

Day 3 : Presentation on Rural innovations by Ganesh Ramakrishnan

2.Water Management In Villages

❏ In coordination with professor of CTARA(Centre For Technology Alternatives For Rural Areas), the Rural IVRS System we had developed is being customised to account for water management problem in villages.

❏ Using the system we obtain the status of the water level in each and every village.

❏ Knowing the status of water in villages, it becomes easy for NGO’s to approach villages and provide water facility.

❏ It ensures that the water scarcity problem is overcome, and water is supplied to villages at times when required.

❏ Providing the basic living need for the community we stand by dharma and following dharma we achieve artha.

Traditional implementation of Water management system

❏ We must understand and practice traditional methods for implementation of water management system.

❏ The aim of this project is to give an overview of the water resource availability, the lifestyle of the villagers and their current needs. This work is being done in collaboration with “Jalvardhini”, an NGO working towards the sustainable development of villages in Karjat.

JALVARDHINI PRATISHTHAN have developed NINE ( 9 ) Ferro cement Tanks at Gogate's Shree Yogeshwari and Shree-Wyadeshvar Mandir at Kondhane,Dist Raigad.

It promotes the ideology to strengthen the villagers’ current water sources and make them self-sufficient and sustainable instead of coming up with new ideas involving huge investments.

❏ Eg - Building of dams is wrong. We must not replace methods but use supplementary methods instead.

Ulhas Paranjpe, a retired civil engineer and the man behind setting up of many water storage tanks in rural India. He is one of the coordinators at Jalvardhini Pratisthan and alongwith him we worked towards setting up a rural rndcenter for villages .

We demonstrated several innovation videos which can be useful to farmers like plastic reuse, arvind gupta toys, personality development sessions , expert advice which was a successful initiative inthis direction.

JALVARDHINI

3. Jaggery SurveyIt was a survey conducted for the Jaggery farmers about their resources to improve their status and farming skills after understanding their problems and needs.

Purpose:

● The goal was to collect collect information about their land and resources they possess and to suggest the optimum use of them.

● To make a stable database to store all these information.

● To manipulate these collected data for helping farmers.

Problems in Survey:1. Manual Data Collection: They were collecting data manually, by

writing answers of each questions on paper.

2. Exhaustive Repository Creation: Later , they were preparing spreadsheets of collected data by inserting each entry one by one ( again Manually).

3. Data Manipulation: They further wanted to calculate distances between villages ,which was difficult.

4. They didn’t have any automatic way to track the Position of the village

or taluka of survey.

“Fulcrum is an Android app that provide facility to create customized forms for data collections.”1. Time + Effort saving: Technically, by adapting fulcrum forms,

data-collection and repository creation becomes automatic. As it creates data sheet itself.

2. Online + Offline GPS: Position location of each village / taluka is now possible by its inbuilt GPS facility.

3. Import + Export files: Various files, that has been already created, can be imported and all those data, stored can be exported in various file formats ex. .csv, .xls, pdf etc.

4.FULCRUM: Solution to the Survey

Work in progress And Proposed Next Steps

1. A video Library For Farmers

Video Library is another way to advise farmers for Issues related to farming.

It contains videos which suggests farmers on different farming tasks and also issues related to farming like rainwater harvesting, irrigation system etc. The Repository contains videos on diverse topics with diverse languages( Regional languages) so as to maximise our outreach to farmers.

Farmers can use this application to view the videos of their use and can also upload their own videos as a response/feedback to the system.

Only Videos with trusted information is shared with farmers.It is currently proposed and till total implementation it will cost around Rs. 2 lakhs (approx.).

User Cases:

Farmer 1: It’s a monsoon season and he wants to gain some ideas for rainwater harvesting techniques.

Solution: He logs in to the Video library system , can filter the videos of his required topics, can view them and also can “Sync” them all in his phone to view them offline .

User Cases:

Farmer 2: He has seen some of videos for “crop management” and he also wants to contribute to it as he supposes he has some better solution to it.

Solution: He can take a video from his phone’s camera explaining the solution and can upload it from his account which if approved by system admin will be published on the system.

User Cases:

Farmer 3: He has come to a place where he’s getting free Wi-Fi , now he wants to store all the videos related to “ irrigation problem” so that he can show it to his own villagers where there is no Internet.

Solution: He can simply filter out the videos related to “ Irrigation Management” and touch the “Sync” button , It’ll download all related videos in his phone for Offline Surfing.

User Cases:

Farmer 4: He’s currently watching a video but also wants some further suggestions related to current video being played

Solution: Everytime a video is being played, viewer will be recommended another set of videos based on his view preference and related tags with that video.

A possible outlook of System after Implementation :::---

Video Classification And Facets:

Features Of Video Library

1. Tagging and Classification: The videos are classified on the basis of tags like Area, language, topics etc and a farmer can sort videos on the basis of these tags and can browse then.

2.Recommendation: While viewing a video farmers are also be recommended videos similar to the topics or viewed by other farmers similarly.

3.Video Management: The repository of videos is managed by a versioning system so that the repository is secure and can be managed accordingly.

Also Before uploading a video, Its quality is assured.

The “upload” and “sync” feature

After seeing a video if a farmer wants to propose some solution he can record his one video and can upload it to the system.This “upload” feature can also be used to seek “Response” of a farmer after watching the video.

Second , It’s important to give farmers offline access to these videos,for which we provide “sync” option, selecting which a user can download all the videos in his phone for offline access.

Video Kheti v/s Video Library

Video Kheti, an another app made by Microsoft research which implements similar functionalities as video library but lacks some of the main features.

Video Library Video Kheti

1.It offers an option to sync your important videos which allows you for offlline access

1.No such functionality is available

2.It also recommends you the videos, once implemented

2.No Such option available

3.It’ll give access to a large repository of videos

3.Only 57 videos are available to access

::: Animation And Farming :::

Animation is one of the best methods to propagate some information and explain its implication.

We are also developing animated videos for different subjects which we feel cannot be otherwise explained so clearly and is important to farmers.

For ex:- Sugarcane if planted nearer to each other, their leaves come over each other and the lower leaves cannot get sunlight due to which glucose will not get formed and the productivity of sugarcane will lessen. this can be best explained with animation .

An Example of Agriculture through animation

Text to Speech

Text to speech is a technology which converts the text written by you in speech format.We are currently working on it. In our case Farmer/ Expert can write his query /advice and it will be converted to speech in a standard voice format.The complete implementation of this project will cost around Rs.50,000.

NIFNational Innovation Foundation – India is an autonomous institution of Department of Science and Technology, GoI, based on the Honey Bee Network Philosophy, which provides institutional support to grassroots innovators and traditional knowledge holders from the unorganized sector of the society.

We are also to work on some of the animation videos for NIF as a part of a better and entertaining propagation of information as animation videos related to field of innovation.

A Sample NIF Video

Feedbacks/ Recommendations

We welcome any kind of suggestion,feedback or question regarding our system .

Thanks for giving your time.

Backup ppt

RURAL IVRS

• Introduction• Development Purpose of Rural IVRS• Features of Rural IVRS• Technical Support• Users of the system• Call flow of the system

OUTLINE

• Rural IVRS: Interactive Voice Response System • Rural IVR System gives members as well as

publishers a common Phone number, on which they can make calls.

• Members can place orders for products by recording through mobile phones.

• Publishers can save, process or reject orders in Rural IVR system.

INTRODUCTION

DEVELOPMENT PURPOSE➢The main aim of the system –

➢Enable the farmers directly connect to the customers with no middlemen (wholesalers and retailers) in between eating up the benefits which actually have to reach the farmers.

➢This Mobile Based ICT tool will enhance Delivery Efficiency both “Technically and Functionally” for farmers, who are the backbone of the society.

➢This initiative will encourage the farmers more into Traditional Farming Practices(Organic Farming).

Login Page

Dashboard

RURAL IVRS : AT A GLANCE

❑Web Application, built in Java ( JSP/Servlets).❑Operating System Compatibility:Can be accessed from any operating systems. Ex. Windows, Linux etc. ❑Browser Compatibility:Can be viewed from most of the browsers.❑Mobile Support:

Full graphical features even in small devices like Mobile, Tablets etc.

TECHNICAL SUPPORT

• There will be two typical users:●Members:

• Members can be Customers or Farmers.• Call flow of Members will be different than

publishers.●Publishers:

• Publishers will be the authority using this system. Ex . NGOs, Farmer Association etc.

SYSTEM USERS:

CALL FLOW FOR CUSTOMER:

CALL FLOW FOR PUBLISHERS:

• Login Menu:●After Login is successful you will get re-

directed to the Dashboard.• Dashboard:

● It is the main page that will appear after login. It contains all the following tabs.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS:

• Groups:●Located at left most position on dashboard. Contains sub menus:

• Settings:●This also contains sub menus like Update login

credentials, System Settings, Bill Layout Settings and IVRS Menu Settings.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS ( CONTINUED…)

➢Automated Billing System➢Voice Message Response➢Two Way Communication➢Broadcasting message in any language through

Voice/SMS/ Video➢Handling Unknown Numbers➢Customizable Menu➢Child Login➢Easy access to Local Number➢Manage one member in multiple groups

FEATURES OF RURAL IVRS

●Business

●Farmer advisory

●Educational Applications: Instead of comments forum, students can have IVRS to get help from teachers directly.

APPLICATIONS OF RURAL IVRS:

• Research and integration of NLP (Natural Language Processing ) – Speech to Text

• Language interoperability – System should be customizable in all the regional languages

• Voice surveys • Research and development of Ontology

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

To know more, visit - http://ruralivrs.wix.com/home

RURAL IVRS WEBSITE

--->Language interoperability: It is very important for messages to be communicated across different languages. i.e. ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together. Along with message in different languages, it should also satisfy the system performance and compatibility.

---->Text to Speech: We always want to create a system which makes it easier for our users to use. Text to speech is a step in direction which will convert text written to voice and therefore system will be beneficial for both literates and illiterates .

Appendix:1.For Adhale Interaction, visit this link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vpfoM5KHVh_5u7Juyaf7OhHaKaYjqMKlZvz6-_hzbzA/edit

2.For Water management related documents (Jalvardhini):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vpfoM5KHVh_5u7Juyaf7OhHaKaYjqMKlZvz6-_hzbzA/edit https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B81Cxgzy-KJPeFZJbW9DeXpLLTA&usp=sharing_eil