Farmers’ Framework – Farmers’ Buddy
Description
Farmers’ Framework is an end-to-end application to assist the farmers. It makes the life of farmer easier by offering a number of services. Firstly, Farmers Buddy which is a next generation, voice-enabled (multimodal) agriculture portal, provides solutions to small farmers and agriculture students of India with an endeavor to organize all the necessary data on a common portal using a touch screen based kiosk. Besides Salt & fertilizer analysis for a particular region this portal also makes farmers aware of various government schemes, helps them make decisions on mandis/markets and best prices and practices, offers information of offline trainings( like region etc) and online training(YouTube videos) to a farmer. It provides information of tools and solutions (like videos for using a tool), details of vendors (Location on Google Maps, Touch-to-Talk) providing that tool. NGOs trying to spread messages to make agriculture more eco-friendly can do so through this site. The portal gives useful guidelines (voice prompts), thus a farmer need not require any training. Secondly, it provides secure identification/authentication of farmer‟ goods using smart cards. The entire portal is customized and is available in the native language of the farmer based on his details present in his smart card. And finally, Farmers’ Helpline provides customized consultancy (Touch-2-Dial) in a friendly way by enabling farmers to reach out to the right and appropriate person for help using intelligent call routing based on a voice dialog that would be conducted in the native language of the farmer.
What we deliver
Farmers Framework delivers both content and services as follows: – Provides detailed, up-to-date, region-wise, market information – Customized and localized consultancy – Exposure to new trends and techniques – Awareness of various govt. schemes and their application procedure. – Offers in-depth region-wise soil, crop, and fertilizer analysis – Discussion forum and query handling – Helpline for farmers in their native language – Secure identification/authentication with smart cards – Detailed information of agricultural tools, vendors offering a particular tool and videos on how to use them. – Attractive e-commerce option for buying/selling tools/crops. – Gives immense satisfaction – Above all happiness and self-reliance Our customer/target group would be anyone concerned or related to the field of agriculture, be it agricultural students, farmers, agricultural officers, professors, scientists or the various vendors (of agricultural tools, machinery), NGOs and Market-place/ Mandi owners.
Why is the project unique?
‘Farmer’ Framework’ is intuitively designed so that a farmer can use it in a hassle-free manner. The entire portal is simple and farmer-friendly as it offers localization (local language support) and is image-based (picture speaks a thousand words) so that a farmer can relate to the same and understand easily. A farmer can just TOUCH (by using his finger i.e. touch-screen based) or just TALK to his buddy (portal i.e. multimodal) to perform his day-to-day tasks with very little/no difficulty. Further the portal gives useful guidelines (voice prompts). Also, a farmer could just use the helpline i.e. the phone attached to the kiosk to talk to the concerned person. Thus even a disabled person can use the same with little/no training at all. Further the entire application has been built using next-generation technologies like X+V(Xhtml+Voice), Smart Cards, VOIP/SIP etc which are robust, platform independent and truly convergent.
Roadmap
India is a large country with huge diversity. It is almost unimaginable to solve the problems related to literacy, health, social inclusion without the usage of Information communication technology. However, the ICT tools can be beneficial in a realistic manner only when the information is accessible with natural interfaces like voice and devices which are less complicated. The reach of telephony to almost every village in India opens up a fantastic opportunity to bring the fruits of Information technology and self empowerment of a vast majority of our population living in rural areas. Content aimed at empowering specific target groups, which can be accessible easily is the way forward. For long the focus has been on developing content, while there is no doubt that developing content is a huge challenge in a diverse country like ours, it is perhaps time to also look at means of making this content accessible.
Contact
Rahul Sanghi
Renaissance Softlabs
Flat no-601, Reliance Kohinoor Apartments, Mehdipatnam
Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh India.
500028
URL/Website – http://www.renintech.com/farmersbuddy.html
