INFORMATION AND technology will now benefit farmers. Scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-K) and the Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) have joined hands to help the farmers with the best available agro information. This will go a long way promoting scientific farming at the grass root level.
Talking to newsmen here on Friday, Media Lab Asia’s chief coordinator at the IIT-K Dr Jayanta Chatterjee said that an ambitious agro- knowledge dissipation programme titled ‘Digital eco-system for agriculture and rural livelihood’ (DEAL) had been chalked out. The project aimed at developing digital ecology to support Indian agriculture’s next revolution and rural livelihood enhancement services.
The project would also connect many organizations which were creating high-value content for rural digital services.
Dr Chatterjee said under the programme a ‘voice-based kisan blog’ would be created to restore agro knowledge and dissipate it among interested farmers.
The blog would be developed with the inputs from ICAR’s Kisan Vigyan Kendras (KVK).
He said thousands of farmers visit KVKs and scientists there gave scientific solutions to their problems.He said under the project a system had been developed to connect KVKs and discussions on problems would be captured in the kisan blog. Farmers would be at liberty to use the blog at the KVKs to get answers to their respective problems.
The captured knowledge would be classified and presented in regional languages to enable farmers in various parts of the country to benefit from the knowledge store.
{{/usCountry}}The captured knowledge would be classified and presented in regional languages to enable farmers in various parts of the country to benefit from the knowledge store.
{{/usCountry}}Similarly, a programme titled ‘Agro Voc’ was being developed to build semantic websites for information exchange and retrieval among different languages, Dr Chatterjee said.
Scientists of the KVKs would be given training at the Media Lab Asia for running these two projects. He said at least 20 KVKs, four in Uttaranchal and 16 in UP, would be connected via V-SAT by May next and captured knowledge would be dissipated among themselves. Later, when all the KVKs of the country were connected, knowledge dissipation would grow at a faster pace.
On the occasion, deputy director of IIT-K and project investigator MD Singh was also present.