eSagu: An IT-based personalized agro-advisory system

Project information

Status	Finalist
URL	Go to website
Category	Economic Development Agriculture and food security
Country	India
Operational areas	Rural
Target groups	Youth, Women, Men
Fixed connection	Dialup
Wireless connection	GSM, CDMA
Access points	Business, Home, Telecenter, Cafe, Payphone
Interact	Landline Phone, Desktop Computer, Cellphone, Laptop, PDA
Software License Types	Open Source, Proprietary

Project location

Random images Challenge 2008

eSagu: An IT-based personalized agro-advisory system

Brief description
eSAGU (IT-based personalized Agro Advisory System) provides, pro-active, Continuous (Seed to Harvesting) and Personalized Agro Advisories, by a Group of Agri Experts to small and marginal farmers, at the farm gate, exploiting the latest ICT Technologies (based on crop situation data received in the form of Photographs and organized Text through Farmer Co-ordinators, with farmers’ feedback) which helps farmers to deploy scientific farming practices and achieve significant savings through input efficiency and higher outputs, without disturbing them from their regular farm activities.
Vision, Objectives and Goals
Enabling the Small and Marginal Farmers in the developing and under developed countries, to adapt scientific farming to reduce their cost of farming and increase yields in the short term and move to profitable farming management in the long run.
How does ICT contribute to the organisational objectives
eSAGU is an ICT based System where the latest technologicial advancements are harnessed and adapted to deliver the agro advisories to the farmers. The ICT is deployed as a Tool to ensure timeliness, cost effectiveness and acts as an enabler to provide other allied services like Agri Finance, Marketing, Input Supplies and Insurance to farmers on the eSAGU Platform. ICT is one of the main Pillers of eSAGU and acts as a fulcrum for other activities.
Transferability
The eSagu project at national level would have to cover at least 20% of the Indian Farming Community which runs into few million in number. The project has to be anchored in the cluster of villages and India have over 6 Lakh villages. This scanrio therefore requires deployment of Government (Both Center and States), Agri Research and Agri Universities, Private Sector Corporates, Agripreneurs.
Project summary
(a) Overview of Strategy
During the last decade, one can observe that progress in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is affecting all spheres of life. Due to the progress in hardware technologies, we are able to procure high-speed reliable computers with huge storage capacities at an affordable cost. Database and data warehousing technologies can be used to store and retrieve large amount of information and also can be coupled with Internet Technology to deliver information instantaneously to the needy. Recent IT developments enable the maintenance of huge and variety of information (text, image, sound and video) repositories with negligible downtime that can be quickly extracted by millions of users concurrently. Data mining technology can be used to extract useful knowledge from huge databases. Simulation technology can be used to predict the future. The research challenge, here, is to identify the areas where progress in IT could be used to improve the performance of livelihood services and technologies, and build efficient IT-based systems that improve the living standards of rural population. Very few attempts have been made to improve the utilization and performance of agricultural extension by exploiting recent progress in the areas of ICTs.
The eSagu system was developed by Media Lab Asia and International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, India. In eSagu, rather than visiting the crop in person, the agricultural expert delivers the expert advice at regular intervals to each farm by getting the crop status in the form of digital photographs and other information. In this system, significant optimization and efficiency has been achieved with the support of latest development is IT such as database, photography and internet technologies.
(b) Description of eSagu system
An agricultural expert advice is a piece of text which is given for each farm. It contains a list of corrective steps the farmer should carry out in the farm to improve the returns (reduced inputs and increased yield). The main objective of eSagu is to deliver a personalized expert advice in a timely manner to each individual farm at regular intervals (for example, once in a week/two weeks) from the sowing stage to the harvesting stage at each farmer’s door-step.
Normally, in traditional agricultural extension system, agriculture expert should visit the farm for delivering the expert advice of high quality. It is difficult to build and operate eSagu by making agricultural expert to visit farms for delivering the expert advice. However, by exploiting the advances in ICTs, it is possible for the agriculture expert to deliver the expert advice to farm without visiting the farm. The basic idea of eSagu is as follows: instead of agricultural expert visiting the farm, the farm situation is brought to him/her in the form of both digital photographs and text information. The agricultural expert analyzes the crop situation based on the information thus brought-in and prepares the expert advice which will be delivered to the corresponding farmer on the same day (or subsequent day). Two options exist for sending the photographs from the field. The first option is the farmers themselves can send the photographs of his/her own farms. The other method is, instead of farmers, educated and experienced farmers of the village can be brought-in as mediators (we call them as coordinators) who will capture and send the photographs of a group of farms. In developing countries like India, the majority of farmers are either illiterate or semiliterate. It is therefore difficult for the farmers to send the crop situation to agricultural experts. Hence, the second option is followed in eSagu.The eSagu system contains five components viz., farms/farmers, coordinators, agricultural experts, Agricultural Information System (AIS) and Communication System. Farms belong to farmers who are the end-users of the system. A coordinator is an educated (minimum up to 10th standard) and also an experienced farmer who can be found in a village. Agricultural Experts (AEs) possess a university degree in agriculture and were qualified to provide an expert-advice. Agricultural Information System is a computer based information system that contains all the related information such as farmer details, farm photographs and weather data. Communication System is a mechanism to transmit information from farms to agricultural experts and vice versa. If enough bandwidth is not available, information can be transmitted through courier service from the village to the AIS. However, the advice text can be transmitted through dial-up Internet connection from the AIS to the village center.The system works as follows. Each coordinator is associated with a group of farmers (farms). The coordinator collects the registration details of the farms which he/she is associated with and sends the information to AIS. Also, a coordinator visits those farms under at regular intervals and sends the farm details in the form of digital photographs and textual information through the communication system. By accessing the soil data, farmer's details, crop history, crop manuals, and the information sent by the coordinators, the agriculture experts prepare the expert advice. The coordinators get the advice by accessing the AIS through Internet and deliver them to respective farmers. (c) Work done so far and ongoing work
- The development of eSagu was started during Kharif season of 2004. The eSagu system was implemented by delivering advisory to 1051 cotton farms for the farmers of three villages in Warangal district in Andhra Pradesh. The experiment was successful. The impact analysis showed that the farmers gots the benefit of Rs 3,820/- per acre due to savings in fertilizers, pesticide sprays and increase in yield.
- During 2005-06, eSagu system for 5000 farms has been implemented for Cotton, Chilies, Rice, Groundnut, Castor, and Redgram farms in 35 villages spread over six districts in Andhra Pradesh. eSagu Farmers were able to reduce their cost of cultivation by reduced usage of Fertilizers and Pesticides. eSagu Agro Advisories also helped them to increase the outputs.
- The ongoing work since 2006 are as follows.

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