Link some down-to-earth agricultural experts, add an interactive website, allow them to cut across the language divide. Mix all this together, and it serves as potent manure that promises the Indian farmer a rich yield of useful knowledge.
Work by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Bombay), a prestigious educational institution, and its many partners, has allowed IT-savvy knowledge-hungry infomediaries across rural India to dig up relevant demand-driven farming knowledge via aAqua.org.
Agri expert Prasad Kaledhonkar could have a clue about the white patterns emerging on tomato plant leaves in Tamil Nadu, located in the southern part of India. Farmer’s daughter Niyatee Nilesh of western India’s Maharashtra wants advice on buying agricultural land. Shirish, meanwhile, seeks help to learn about using wastewater from the school kitchen to irrigate gardens or crops.
On the eAgra website, there are also crop recommendations archived by keywords, a crop-keyboard browser [to see if questions have already been answered], and a ‘crop doctor’ with photographs for diseased crops archived by keywords.
‘Bhav puchiye’ [literally, ‘ask the price’] has practical use. Market rates from across India are displayed for farmers and agro-traders.
aAqua stands for "almost all questions answered". Says IIT-Bombay’s head at the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology Dr Krithi Ramamrutham: "It used to be called Aqua. We added a small ‘a’ in front of it that stands for ‘almost’. We want to be as realistic as possible."
Bringing diverse strands together
To get a solution that works in the field, IIT-Bombay merged Indian script text input, iconic [or picture-based] interfaces, meaning-based search, digital libraries, community fora, and water-quality sensors. This work brought in skills from diverse horizons like e-pedagogy, multimedia, computer-based training, education, and light databases.
IIT-Bombay used its active natural language processing lab. "We try to get most of the language translated automatically, through an intermediate language [or artificial pivot language] known as UNL or universal networking language," adds Ramamrutham.
"aAqua can be deployed in any domain -education and health too. It’s actually a very simple idea. You and I use it for discussing other things. Here, we need more images, multi-lingual capability, a query facility, and meaning-based search," Prof. Ramamritham told this writer in an interview.
aAqua.org shows up several discussion fora in Indian languages [Marathi and Hindi currently] and English. These deal with crops, animals, officials’ recommendations, market information and schemes for farmers. It now has 940 members, 1364 topics, and 3321 posts.
"What we’ve done, is sign-up experts from various Krishi Vigyan Kendras [the network of farm-extension services in India]," says Ramamrutham. Anyone wanting the information can sign-up through a simple process and file a query.
Work on this first prototype began in November 2003. Oddly, it started just as a course project. "We started working on it in real earnest, when we saw its full potential," he said.
"We are now trying to scale up. Our challenge is that aAqua’s reach should be larger," he adds, before continuing, "We’re looking for going to deeper ways to use this technology. For instance, forecasting disease, going by census and other information. We want to enlarge its scope of applicability."
Meanwhile, the use of eAqua is being discussed at the central Indian city of Pune’s metrology department. MarathiWorld.com contemplates using it to answer career counselling queries and Drishtee, a North India project, sees potential in this being a citizens’ complaints system.
Ramamrutham himself grew up in a village in Thanjavur, South India. He studied in the prestigious IIT -which trains the elite of Indian technological students, many of whom migrate to the West. He himself moved to the US [Utah], then returned home in 1998.
Ramamrutham calls this a "great learning experience", while the work of him and his colleagues has also been recognised by the Manthan Award, a prize honouring “India’s best e-content practices”.