The research-farmer linkages mediated by the extension system played a crucial role in the advancement of food security through the Green Revolution in India in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Policy makers have acknowledged that this extension system has collapsed in India today while altogether new challenges, especially climate variability, soil quality reduction and water scarcity, have emerged. Studies by the Union Planning Commission have pointed out the importance of re-orienting or reviving the public sector extension processes, moving them out of a focus on grain yields while looking at the larger issues such as resource constraints and market opportunities. Recent studies have recommended giving serious consideration to the opportunities presented by contemporary ICT’s in strengthening extension.
The NAIP’s approach to knowledge management allows for the development of highly integrated approaches between agricultural research and education sectors with established extension processes such as the KVK as well as with emerging actors in private sector extension and with organizations promting rural information access centers (village information kiosks or rural knowledge centers). In this proposal, a consortium of partners from the agricultural research and education sector and ICT for development area will work together to organise a national pilot project. They will develop new and revived linkages between research and education sectors with agricultural extension, through the use of ICT mediation and contemporary practices in knowledge and information management. The engagement with farmers will be through online as well as offline methods. The emphasis is on providing information support services to the extension personnel and farmers in a seamless fashion. This integration of back-end digital services to generate an access and delivery system for different stakeholders in online and offline modes is at the core of this action-research effort.
The overall architecture and the access and delivery modes are captured in two diagrams (see below). Figure 1 outlines the knowledge base. The idea is to build first a comprehensive knowledge base that can combine a host of generic and location-specific information emerging from various NARES and international partners (four in this project) and organize them using an interface patterned after the Wikipedia (read/write web sites). FAO’s AGROVOC, a global thesaurus of agricultural terms, will serve as a tool in content organization in this scheme. This will also make use of a forum (online or offline) to receive queries and to support discussions, thus enabling dynamic information to be captured in the main content organization. The same system also enables the capture and use of dynamic data on weather or commodity prices or map/imagery information for rapid processing in support of decision making at local or institutional level.
Figure 1. K Org. in Indian Agriculture
In the second diagram, a process to blend the knowledge organization with readily available processes for digital library management and e-learning will be developed. The integrated process will be connected to the users through a series of software interfaces to enable delivery in different modes, involving PC’s or mobile phones or broadcast media or print. The seamless integration of multiple digital technologies to deliver value to the different stakeholders is a key challenge this project will address. It will also address the challenge of developing rigorous methods for the impact assessment using the tools of contemporary development communication besides those of economics and sociology.
Figure 2. Novel Content Creation & Delivery Services in Indian Agriculture
