07. Pan-Commonwealth Forum 7 (PCF7), 2013
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Browsing 07. Pan-Commonwealth Forum 7 (PCF7), 2013 by Subject "Agriculture"
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Publicatione-Choupal: The Power of ICT for Farmers’ Empowerment in India( 2013-11)Choupal in Hindi language means a village gathering place. Taking this gathering place to the virtual world, ITC (one of the India’s largest and oldest business conglomerates) introduced the e – Choupal to empower rural India in the year 2000. It places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages and serves as a place of exchange of information and an e – commerce access point. It is a low cost system which focuses on the need of the rural farmers by removing their isolation and providing transparent system in their interest. // e – Choupal provides better supply chain for ITC’s food and agri businesses. It enables reach to the underserved rural markets. For rural farmers it caters new IT enabled services and business opportunities i. e. health, education, entertainment, and e – governance. It increases shareholder’s value through serving the society. The critical success factors of e – Choupal are comprehensive knowledge of rural markets, designing a win – win transaction model, leveraging the logistics channel, selection of Sanchalak (operator), evolving an appropriate user interface and bottom-up model for entrepreneurship. // The e – Choupal model shows that a large corporation can play a major role in recognizing markets and increasing the efficiency of an agricultural system. The case also uncovers the key role of information technology – in this case provided and maintained by a corporation – but utilized by local farmers. This access to information helps farmers in improving the quality of produce and obtaining better prices. Elected from the village itself, a literate farmer acts as the interface between the illiterate farmers and the computer. The model shows that a large corporation can combine a social mission and an ambitious commercial venture, that it can play a major role in rationalizing markets and increasing the efficiency of an agriculture system, and do so in ways that benefit rural communities. // The proposed case study will be covering the background, the impact, key elements of empowerment, issues, lessons, determinants for success and long term assessment of the system’s productivity and efficiency levels. // Paper ID: 80 -
PublicationFarmer education and training (FARM-ED): enhancing access to agricultural education in Africa( 2013-11)The vast majority of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)are smallholders, many of whom are women, who have limited access to inputs and markets and face a growing number of production challenges. Few young people are being attracted into agriculture because they see better opportunities elsewhere. New knowledge can help farmers to significantly enhance their productivity and income and stimulate the creation of rural businesses, but such knowledge is not available in many rural communities. An innovative Pan-African initiative on farmer education and training in SSA (FARM-ED) aims to address these issues by exploiting the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and emerging information and communication technologies. // FARM-ED draws on the lessons from successful large-scale OER programmes in the education and health sectors, run by the UK Open University (OU) in collaboration with local partners in Africa and South Asia. These programmes have demonstrated how high quality learning materials can reach substantial numbers of people within a short period of time. A key feature of the approach is to establish partnerships which bring in relevant expertise and facilitate local ownership. FARM-ED is led by a consortium of knowledge institutions including the OU, the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich and the regional university networks in Africa, RUFORUM and ANAFE. But the partnership extends much more widely and includes civil society organizations, the private sector and government agencies. The emphasis is on strengthening the capacity of intermediaries to respond more effectively to the demand from farmers for knowledge on how to improve their farming systems. // An initial scoping study carried out in East Africa in 2012 revealed that there is considerable interest among different types of organization to participate in the development of OERs and to receive training in their effective use. Another clear message was the importance of addressing the needs of women and young people, and to help them overcome barriers to success. A particular challenge for FARM-ED is to reflect the wide diversity of agricultural systems and socio-cultural practices within and between countries in SSA. Generic learning materials are being developed for use with different media (including print and mobile) and will be freely available online. Although generic, there will be a strong emphasis on adaptation of the learning materials for the local context and, through working with communities of practice, improving them in line with feedback from users. // FARM-ED also aims to help to create a more favourable enabling environment for the implementation of best practice in priority areas such as adaptation to climate change, nutrition and rural entrepreneurship. It will do this through the development of special courses for policy makers and by engagement with national policy processes. // Paper ID: 184
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PublicationKnowledge and Skill Development using Mobile Technology for Reducing Risks among Farmers( 2013-11)Indian resource poor farmers face several challenges such as lack of information on soil fertility, availability of quality seeds and other inputs, dependable weather forecast linked advisories, suitable crop varieties, its management, post harvest technologies, market information, access to credits, storage facilities and management of livestock. They also lack necessary skills and essential linkages with financial, market and scientific institutions. MSSRF bridges the gap by using various modern Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), using its Village Resource and Knowledge Centre network. The VRC-VKCs disseminate locale specific and demanded information to the farmers of Tamilnadu, Pudhucherry, Maharashtra and Odisha for the past 15 years for the knowledge empowerment and sustainable development. // MSSRF connects the farming community with technical institutions such as agricultural universities, KVKs, Research institutions and individual experts to provide science based quality and timely information and conducts training and awareness programmes of topical interest to the farmers. // MSSRF forms grassroots level institutions of farmers and capacitate them for accessing technologies, government approved farm credits and market. MSSRF’s programmes such as farm schools, plant clinic, soil and water testing laboratory, phone helpline, advisories through voice and text SMS, phone in programmes, satellite and internet based video interactions to link the farmers with the farm scientists. In order to promote ‘learning by doing’, MSSRF organizes visits of farmers to the progressive farmer’s fields. // MSSRF delivers information to 100,000 farmers across 1119 villages in 4 states. MSSRF interventions have brought out notable desired changes in the farming practices, increased farm productivity and net incomes, improved Farm health and reduced expenses on inputs to our focus farmers. For example, the farmers linked with Thiruvaiyaru VRC were provided with the real time information for their produce such as paddy, banana etc. and helped the farmers to get an approximate 20-25% additional income. // Paper ID: 430
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PublicationOpen Course Creation by Learners: A Way Forward in Agriculture Education( 2013-11)Reaching out to the potential learners in agriculture with quality content is a great challenge and thereby requires innovations and technology in content development, management, and delivery. Use of innovations and technologies in generating and delivering the learning resources and creating the learning environment is increasing to enhance the reach and effectiveness of education. This development is leading towards Technology mediated learning. A consortium of Indira Gandhi National Open University, Tamilnadu Agricultural University, Maharashtra Open University and ICRISAT has implemented a project on “Innovations in Technology Mediated Learning: An Institutional Capacity Building in Using Re-usable Learning Objects in Agro- Horticulture”. This was supported by the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) of India. The focus was learners’ centric e-learning in agriculture in the form of Reusable Learning Objects (RLO) on the philosophy of Open Educational Resources (OER). A Content Management System called “AgriLORE” was created which allows for collaborative creation and unrestricted use of learning materials in agriculture. AgriLORE (www.agrilore.org) is a place for creating, sharing, searching and easy accessing of learning objects /courses related to agro-horticulture crops which can be of great use to the learning community. The tagging standards based on IEEE Learning Object Metadata have been implemented for ease search and retrieval of information. // About 500 RLOs were developed and are available at AgriLORE on six crops with five major themes. Each RLO has a profile that determines its relationship with other RLO. The relationship between concepts and RLOs are based on a granularised structure and constrained vocabulary that are used in Crop Knowledge Models. An aggregation tool which allows the learners to group the RLOs into courses based on their requirement was implemented in to build a larger curriculum. Development of courses through meaningful grouping of RLOs to provide the educational resources needed to fulfill credit requirements in a certification process is an important innovation attempted. Full paper will provide details on the OER-RLO repository design and RLO authoring and validation processes. // Paper ID: 68
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PublicationRepository Of Indian National Agricultural Research & Education System (NARES): Open Access To Institutional Knowledge( 2013-11)Indian National Agricultural Research & Education System (NARES) is a huge repository of knowledge and information on crop sciences, horticulture, resource management, animal sciences, agricultural engineering, fisheries, agricultural extension and agricultural education. Digital technologies and online access to information resources have brought increased expectation from library and information services. For researchers, fast access to existing scientific outputs and archived scholarly information on his topic of interest is as crucial as current scientific knowledge. // ‘KrishiKosh’ is the institutional repository aiming to hold all the intellectual outputs of the Indian NARES system in the form of digitized institutional publications, technical reports, annual reports, lectures, authors collection in the form of preprints, reprints, old books etc. These contents to which one can easily have open access, essentially captures all the intellectual work being done under NARES. The same intellectual output when gets published in the form of research papers in the commercial journals become less accessible due to high cost. Thus institutional repository provides alternative source of scientific information to support quality research and teaching in line with objectives of open learning and OER. // ‘KrishiKosh’ has been created under the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) and digitization of the valuable content was taken up by four major institutions of Indian NARES, namely, Acharya N G Ranga Agricultural University, Hyderabad; Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi; Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Izatnagar; and University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru. Using Open Source software, the material in the repository was organized into Institution-wise collection of documents such as books, journals, theses, reports, articles etc. The process of digitization including scanning, cleaning, cropping, conversion to text (OCR), conversion to PDF/A (an open ISO standard). Finally, metadata tagging and uploading the fully searchable digital items in the repository has been done for about 9 million pages comprising about 20,000 documents. To make searches more relevant, ‘Agrotags’ which is a carefully selected subset of ‘Agrovoc’ of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been integrated with KrishiKosh. // Paper ID: 295
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PublicationRing Back Tones to Livelihood Changing face of MPlatform Services: Indian Experience( 2013-11)Bollywood more often then not, is the fulcrum of change in the Indian sub continent. It remains a trend setter, be it for personal likes and dislikes or the ambition of being the Super hero in real life. It has had an amazing impact over the past 6 decades on every Indian, be it in the rural or in the urban part of the country. // The advent of mobiles over the years has transformed, and given rise to the cliched statement ," India has more mobiles then Toilets" , a fact indeed. The 3 inch device has transformed numerous lives and attempts are being made to provide more on the device under the aegis of Value added services. // Plethora of services are being launched and what has truly emerged is the fact that “ Media approach” remains the flavour of the day. Again a benchmark to be drawn from the recent launch of a “ Bollywood video” over the mobile phone at less then a Cent. Service acceptability is a challenge- given the lower literacy levels but usage of mobiles is increasing at the behest of the Bollywood related services. // Our paper would like to provide a detailed view of how the famous Ring Back tones and other Bollywood related services has created user stickiness to the mobile services, which in turn is helping to accept other forms of services which have bearing on the lives of each individual in the rural part of the country. It will focus on the journey of ' Value added services 'and its transformation over the years, with the clear focus to provide multiple services to the unreached. The paper will evaluate the various services which are currently being offered with respect to : livelihood , agriculture, health, education etc. // Paper ID: 331
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PublicationThe Role of Distance Education and E- learning in Agricultural Extension Services( 2013-11)Education has very significance and strategic role in all aspects of the development of any nation. Distance education and e-learning role in agriculture extension services is a viable mechanism for the upliftment of the standard of education and in the dissemination of advanced and adequate teaching. Distance education has become a popular method of instruction, especially for those with demanding full-time jobs or who find it difficult to invest time and expense in travel. The increasing improved connectivity to the internet and rapid development in mobile access in Africa accelerates the promotion of e-learning to provide quality higher education on the continent. To this end, this paper examines the role of distance education and e-learning in agricultural extension services. It discusses the concepts of distance education and e-learning, Agricultural Extension as a concept, functions of Agricultural Extension Agents (AEAs). Finally, it highlights the current trends in the training of AEAs through ODL and e-learning to fill in their deficiency gap. // Paper ID: 484
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Publication“Scaling up” Life Long Learning of Farmers (L3F): Expanding the horizon and empowering the communities, experiences from India( 2013-11)The paper discusses the results and lessons learned in the mobile based Life Long Learning of Farmers (L3F) project implemented in Tamil Nadu, India. The methodology designed and plan developed to replicate/scaling up the results of the project horizontally and vertically – at district level through meetings, dialogue and policy influence. The other aspects covered are enabling factors and constraints faced. How the emerging results have increased the ownership of the major stakeholders. The paper also shares the ongoing efforts/ strategy for scaling up to achieve results at state/national levels particularly with in banking sector and progress made till now. // Paper ID: 442