Contemporary information and knowledge management: impact on farming in India

Date
2011Abstract
Farming is an important part of Indian economy and it involves a wide range of
stakeholders, of whom the small holder farmers are the largest group. Information sharing
on new production processes with farmers was prominent in the ‘sixties which was key to
the success of the Green Revolution. Agricultural extension, the process of enabling farmers
and experts to exchange information with each other, has since been institutionalized to a
high degree and is assessed to be not as effective as it had been a generation back. The
advent of digital, technology-mediated information and knowledge management was
thought to offer significant new opportunities for knowledge exchange in Indian farming as
a whole. These hopes led to the launching of a number of initiatives in different parts of
India, which has emerged as the host of the largest number of rural development projects
where contemporary information and communication technology (ICT) play a pivotal role.
While analyzing the outputs of such initiatives, many studies have pointed out that farming
is not a priority concern of most of them. On the other hand, we can notice a noncomplimentary
strand of ICT in agriculture projects operated by a number of institutions
with ICT resources playing a key role in some of them. These efforts, generally speaking, do
not promote user participation in information flows quite unlike the contemporary trends.
Almost two decades later, the original hope remains unfulfilled. The nation-wide availability
of digital content in relation to the farming sector is small when compared to equally
important development sectors such as public health. This has considerably limited the
opportunities for various stakeholders to build viable online services on production,
marketing and meteorology for farmers and other stakeholders. What we now have is a
collection of projectized activities that are fragmented in their overall understanding and
approaches. What we need is an approach that can bring together the two strands, namely,
of ICT in rural development and ICT in agriculture. Such an effort, however, needs a new IT
architecture to be developed for aggregation of content and to make services available in
multiple modes. Two groups of projects in India, namely, the Agropedia and the KISSANKerala,
have built large prototypes and human capacities using unprecedented innovations
in web technology areas and in integrated services delivery (including mobile telephony).
With their advent, a wider range of solutions to the challenge of developing a novel
architecture for information services for farming in India are now feasible and need to be
researched upon. Countries that offered extension models for India in in an earlier
generation do not require innovations for mass outreach for prosperity through farming and
are thus in position to offer models for the present India needs to build solutions, processes
and structures of its own so that the advantages accruing from its rapidly advancing ICT
and mobile telephony infrastructure and export-oriented IT sector can flow to the benefit of
its farmers. Formation of synergies with non-traditional partners such as those in ICT sector
will be essential. There is a task to be accomplished, and it is contrary to the prevalent
understanding in the leadership of farm education, research and extension sector that all
the ICT solutions needed are available.
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