Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Digital India Corporation (DIC) on Wednesday signed an initial pact to provide location specific farm tele-advisories.
“The objective of the MoU is to integrate the existing Interactive Information Dissemination System (IIDS) platform of DIC with the proposed KisanSarathi programme of ICAR and its implementation through ICAR network to reach a large number of farmers across the country,” an official statement said.
The MoU intends to facilitate farmers by providing location specific Demand Based Tele Agriculture Advisories’, it added.
While ICAR is under the agriculture ministry, DIC comes under Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology.
ICAR and DIC have agreed to collaborate to develop and deploy ICT platforms to establish and operate a multi-media, multi-way advisory and communication system for supporting various agricultural activities at local level, the statement said.
To start with, IIDS would be deployed at ICAR which is a push-and pull-based system wherein agriculture-related information can be pulled from the farmers using mobile phones.
IIDS gives an option to farmers to receive individual needs-based information for only those services to which they have subscribed.
The experts at the back end will have access to the farmers’ database while responding to their queries.
In this manner, experts would be able to understand the problems raised by farmers or field problems in a better way (KYF Know Your Farmer) and expeditiously provide appropriate solutions to the farmer in a personalized manner.
Currently, the IIDS platform has been deployed in North Eastern states, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana which would be extended to all over the country with this MoU with ICAR.
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DIC will be providing the entire technical solution with support for development, hosting and managing the requisite ICT platform.
On the other hand, ICAR will be managing and monitoring the entire operations through their extension services network in the form of Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), various domain specific research institutes and network of agricultural universities etc, in a phased manner.
The MoU signing was presided over by Trilochan Mohapatra, Secretary, Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE) & Director General (ICAR); Sanjay Kumar Singh, Additional Secretary (DARE) & Secretary (ICAR) and Abhishek Singh, Managing Director & CEO, DIC.
