ICT tools used in agriculture
Authors: Arti1, Chandan Kumar Rai2
1Ph.D. Research Scholar, Dairy Economics Statistics and Management, ICAR-NDRI Karnal
2Ph.D. Research Scholar, Dairy Extension, ICAR-NDRI Karnal
Email: atartithakur92@gmail.com

Agriculture is the backbone of Indian economy. It plays important role in economic and social development of country like India, where 58% of the people engaged in agriculture. Thus, Overall development of a country is not possible without agriculture. For growth of agriculture, it is important to disseminate the technology to the field. There are various methods to disseminate information to the field. ICT in agriculture is an emerging field focusing on the enhancement of agricultural and rural development in India. ICT is one of the important tool which provides the daily information to the farmers based on their need. Introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables the dissemination of essential information to the famers at the right time. This revolution in information technology has made access to the information easy and cost-effective. Digitization is forming a digital version of analog/physical things such as paper documents, microfilm images, photographs, sounds and more. This digital information can be used by the farmers for various purposes based on their needs. Digitalization will play important role in agriculture innovation. Today, Information and Communication Technology can and should be a key agent for changing people’s lives by improving access to information and sharing of knowledge. There are various ICT tools used in agriculture and some of them are given below:

    • Krishi: Knowledge based Resources Information Systems Hub for Innovations in agriculture , is an initiative of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to bring its knowledge resources to all stakeholders at one place. This portal acts as a Centralized data repository system of ICAR. It consists of technology, data generated through the experiments/surveys, publications and learning resources.
    • PGR Portal: This portal is a gateway to information on plant genetic resources conserved in the Indian National Genebank housed at the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR). The Indian National Genebank conserves about 0.4 m accessions belonging to about 1800 species. The information which is provided by this portal is available to farmer, researcher, students and policy makers.
    • KrishiKosh: is a digital repository system which accumulate knowledge in agriculture and allied sciences, having collection of old and valuable books, old journals, thesis, research articles, popular articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, pamphlets, brochures, bulletins and other literatures spread all over the country in different ICAR Research Institutions and State Agricultural Universities (SAUs). Salient Features of Krishikosh
  • Krishikosh is digital repository platform capable of Decentralized Management of Content but Centralized Hosting and maintenance for convenience of multiple users.
  • Krishikosh Institutional repository of NARES provides open access to institutional knowledge. Krishikosh has been developed by customizing open source software Dspace.
  • At present Krishikosh has more than 20 million digitized pages in 83,000 digital items (volumes) like old books, old Journals, reports, proceedings, reprint, research highlights, training manuals, historical records.
  • Includes more than 35,000 Ph.D and M.Sc. theses submitted by various ICAR Institutes / SAUs and with full Text searchable facilities.
  • Krishikosh provides ready software platform, similar to ‘Cloud Service’ for individual institution’s self-managed repository with central integration of all individual repositories.
  • It is full text searchable open access repository. Semantic search enabled through the integration of Agro tags.
  • Comprehensive search and browse options are available.
  • Easy to register for additional facilities.
  • User feedback provision for continuous improvement.
  • Subscribed users can get collection updates.
  • Institutional users can administer their own repository and can upload, remove, set embargo on their institutional content.
    • RiceXpert: it is a mobile app developed for the farmers to provide information to farmers in real time on insect pests, nutrients, weeds, nematodes and disease-related problems, rice varieties for different ecologies, farm implements for different field and post-harvest operations. This app facilitates the flow of information from farmer to the farm scientists and instantly provides the solution to the problems. Farmer can use this app to know about their queries instantly. This App may also be a very useful tool for the researchers, students and village level workers (VLWs) working on rice crop in different states as well as in the country.
    • Crop Insurance Mobile app: This mobile app can be used to find out the complete details about the cover available, insurance premium under notified crops, coverage amount in case of loanee farmer. This scheme is extended by both public and private companies. States/UTs nominate insurance companies to extend insurance cover for different crops in districts/blocks. There is also a specific period during which farmers can avail this facility. Due to administrative and technical reasons much of this information is not able to reach to the farmers well in time to take advantage of these schemes. It can also be used to get details of normal sum insured, extended sum insured, premium details and subsidy information of any notified crop in any notified area.
    • Agri-Market Mobile App: Farmers suffers from losses due to distress sales in the absence of proper information. This app is developed with the aim to provide the information on prices in the different markets to the farmers. AgriMarket Mobile App can be used to get the market price of crops in the markets within 50 km of the device’s location. This app automatically captures the location by using mobile GPS and fetches the market prices of crops in different markets which are present in the vicinity of that area (50 km). There is another option to get price of any market and any crop in case person does not want to use GPS location. The prevailing prices are fetched from the Agmarknet portal.
    • mKishan Portal: This portal is helpful to the farmer in providing the information/services to the farmers in agriculture and allied sectors through SMS in different languages.
    • Farmers’ Portal: (One stop shop for farmers) Farmers’ Portal is an endeavour in this direction to create one stop shop for meeting all informational needs relating to Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Fisheries sectors production, sale/storage of an Indian farmer. In farmers’ portal farmers will get information on specific subjects of their village/block /state. The information is given to the farmers in the form of text, SMS, audio/video and through email in their language .Farmer will give valuable suggestion and feedback through feedback module.
    • National Agriculture Market Portal: National Agriculture Market (NAM) is a pan-India electronic trading portal that connects the existing APMC mandis to create a uniform national market platform for agricultural commodities. It provides all the information and services through a single window system. This online platform contains information about commodity arrivals and prices. This also includes buy and sell trade offers and provision to respond to trade offers among other services. This online system reduces the transaction cost and provides uniform inform related to prices. Agriculture marketing is administered by the states as per the marketing regulations, based on which state is divided into several market areas. These markets are administered by the Agriculture marketing is administered by a separate Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) which imposes its own marketing regulation (including fees). This fragmentation of markets, even within the State, hinders free flow of agri commodities from one market area to another and multiple handling of agri-produce and multiple levels of mandi charges ends up escalating the prices for the consumers without commensurate benefit to the farmer. NAM solves the various problems by creating a unified market through online trading platform, both at State and National level. It promotes the uniformity, integrates different markets, removes the information asymmetry among different markets and promotes real time price discovery based on actual demand and supply. It promotes transparency in auction process and provides national market for the farmer. This online payment provides more transparency, quality and more reasonable prices to the consumers.
    • mKRISHI: This app is for aquaculture operations, providing digitally enables services on demand to the aqua farmers in the country. This portal is developed by the MPEDA. It provides the information related to wind speed, wave height, weather and best practices related to fisheries.
    • Epashuhaat: It is a web portal launched by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India, under the Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries (DADF) to boost dairy productivity in India by organizing the livestock market. The portal allows farmers and entrepreneurs find information about bovine animals, buy or sell livestock, frozen semen and embryos. It also helps them to check information on feed and fodder and manage the transportation of animals once a purchase is made.
Feature:

  • No login is required, as information is easily accessible.
  • For making any transaction, registration is compulsory.
Services which are provided in the portal are given below :

  • Training
  • Animal Certificates Services
  • Certification Verification Services
  • Nutritional advisory service
  • Good care practice
  • Health Card Services
  • Fodder Services
  • SMS reminder services
  • Disease Screening and Testing
  • Mail reminder services
    • Kisan Point: Kisan Point is market place for farmers and all other agriculture stake holders. Farmers can sell/buy/lease their land, crops, natural manures, cattle, used farm machinery etc using this e-trading platform. Farmers can also transparently buy inputs and implements using online shopping and ecommerce platform.
    • Pusa Krishi: The app provide farmers with information related to new varieties of crops developed by Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), resource conserving cultivation practices as well as farm machinery and its implementation will help in increasing returns to farmers. It is developed by ICAR-IARI under the NEGP-A project of IT division of Department of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare to disseminate the information to the farmers, stakeholders and industrialists.
    • Farm-o-pedia: The application is informative as well as can be used for daily routines. The app is useful for farmers or anyone related to agriculture. It is available in English and Gujarati languages. This app is targeted to rural Gujarat.
The main functions of the app are:

  • To get suitable crops as per soil and season
  • To get crop information
  • Check weather
    • Direct Benefit Portal: First phase of DBT was initiated in 43 districts and later on 78 more districts were added in 27 schemes pertaining to scholarships, women, child and labour welfare. DBT was further expanded across the country on 12.12.2014. 7 new scholarship schemes and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was brought under DBT in 300 identified districts with higher Aadhaar enrolment.
    • Kisan Suvidha App: Kisan Suvidha is an omnibus mobile app developed to help farmers by providing relevant information to them quickly. With click of a button, they can get the information on weather of current day and next 5 days, dealers, market prices, agro advisories, plant protection, IPM Practices etc. Unique features like extreme weather alerts and market prices of commodity in nearest area and the maximum price in state as well as India have been added to empower farmers in the best possible manner.


References:

1. http://www.enam.gov.in/NAM/home/index.html
2. http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/
3. https://dbtbharat.gov.in/
4. https://apps.mgov.gov.in
5. http://krishiworld.com/
6. https://epashuhaat.gov.in/



About Author / Additional Info:
I am PhD research scholar (Agricultural Economics) at ICAR-NDRI, KARNAL , INDIA