AMS-ICRISAT
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About Adakkal
Adakkal is a Mandal of 21 villages covering 16 hamlets in Mahabubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh State in India. Adakkal’s economy revolves around semi-arid agriculture and livestock. Out of 14,616.40 ha of cultivated land, around 11,440 ha are cultivated under rainfed conditions . More than 70% of the population are small and marginal farmers. Adakkal is in a low rainfall region and its average rainfall was 550 mm, more than 90 percent of it occurring during the period between June to October. Similar to other SAT regions (Ryan and Spencer, 2001) Adakkal also depends on livestock comprising approximately 70,000 sheep, 9000 cattle and 8000 goats to survive the vagaries of the local climate. However, there has been noticeable lack of drought coping and support systems in the locality. Large scale out-migration has become the principal drought-coping mechanism of the people in this area, while suicides among the farm families have occured since 2004 (Gaharwar, 2005).
Adarsha Mahila Samaikhya
The Adarsha Mahila Samaikhya (AMS- the Adarsha Women’s Welfare Organization in English) is a federation of all-women micro-credit groups that functions in Adakkal. It has a membership of about 5200 women, covering all the 21 villages in the locality. AMS has been operating in this area since 1994 to address various development issues of rural families resident in this area. With the support of the State Government, AMS sought the partnership of ICRISAT to establish an information-based program to combat drought and to mitigate its impact. The activities in this regard take place under the umbrella of the VASAT project
Role of ICT
ICRISAT, with support from the State Government, set up an internet-connected hub in the AMS premises using a low cost connectivity arrangement and further supplied a small number of PC’s to support the local operations. ICRISAT has set up Village Knowledge Centres in eight villages each with its own set of PC’s and Internet facilities, and plans to extend this facility to all the 21 villages in the region shortly (Figure 1). These rural knowledge centres are operated by AMS volunteers and ICRISAT involves in capacity building and strengthening. AMS volunteers maintain a record of all agricultural queries and their responses/solutions provided by ICRISAT experts.The strongest linkages were found to occur within the community, which implied that the primary pattern of knowledge transfer was horizontal and between sources with relatively limited contemporary knowledge of agricultural production practices. The linkages with the agricultural extension processes with the rural residents were assessed to be generally weak. Surprisingly, input suppliers and other agricultural traders were about the most important source of information. Market, climate, employment and wages emerged as some of the most important information needs of the community.
An early realisation was that a spectrum of information services, rather than those covering only the rural production aspects, would be useful to obtain local buy-in into the management of new information services. Secondly, a process of facilitation would be a valuable input in enabling information access by the rural families, whose familiarity with PC-based information systems was extremely limited. ICRISAT has since helped the AMS members manage the information hub and in designing a information service providing local weather, wages, market information and occasionally other services such as access to school examination results. Production-related information was always presented as an auxiliary service rather than primary. The regularity of this wider range of information was essential in rendering the ICT-based information service to be perceived as a reliable source for any information including agricultural production-related information.
A structured experiment on varying values of prominence of technology and the intermediary revealed that equal prominence of intermediary and technology has a greater impact on farmer-participants.
Support Through Video conference
Since March 2007, VASAT has been using a two-way video-conferencing facility provided by the Indian Space Research Organization via the National Remote Sensing Centre to assess changes in the effectiveness of query-responses when a new digital medium is used (Figure 3). Initially the video conferencing was conducted for two hours per week and from November 2008 we have increased the frequency. During these sessions experts from ICRISAT train the AMS volunteers about the package of practices of different crops grown in that area. The training is provided in Telugu, the local language, with the help of PowerPoint presentations and videos. The complex queries that arise during these sessions are noted down and are uploaded on to an online forum (www.aaqua.org), which has features to enable any registered expert to view the queries and answers. The answer is then communicated to the AMS volunteers during subsequent sessions. In addition to this, experts from ICRISAT give special sessions on new technologies in agriculture. File:Example.jpg
