ICT mediated agricultural extension: A study of e-sagu and a aqua project

In the past few years, the usefulness of Information and Communication Technologies(ICTs)-especially internet and cell phone to bridge the gap between scientific know-how and field level do-how is felt by developmental organizations throughout the world. Few technological revolutions have such a wide ranging transformation in our daily lives as the internet and cell phone.

The new ICTs are beginning to transform the way agricultural extension is being done. The ICT enabled extension systems are acting as key agents for changing agrarian situation and farmers ’lives by improving access to information and sharing knowledge. There is an urgent need to study such systems for sustainability, scalability and identification of best practices.

This report is a survey of some of leading ICT initiatives in agriculture such as eSagu and aAqua. eSagu aims at improving the farm productivity by delivering high quality personalized (farm specific) agro-expert advice in a timely manner to each farmer at the farmer's doorstep. aAqua is an online expert Question and Answer community forum, developed for delivering information to the grass-roots. The working of the project, strategy adopted and its influence on the farming community is studied in the paper. It also gives an insight into the limitations and the future course of action for the agricultural extension process in India through ICTs.