Right from the beginning, communication has been one of the building blocks for human development. From the time language was developed to communicate, today we see satellite based communication facilities. Today it would be difficult to even visualize human existence without communication facilities. Many sectors of our economy have been benefited in a big way from modern communication tools. However agriculture sector still lacks behind.

Even in 21st century today farmers are looking for information that can make a difference in their existing status. As per one estimate, information alone can increase overall efficiency of agricultural operations to provide more benefits even as compared to the technologies delivered during green revolution period.

Morarka Foundation began its working for agriculture development since 1994-95. In most of our interactions, we realized that many of the services required by the farmers could be delivered by modern communication means. On one hand this would reduce the time-lag and on another hand it would reduce the cost of extension services.

To achieve this objective in 1998, we started with market price information services being delivered through Hindi Pagers. We entered into a tie-up with National Horticulture Board, Jaipur Office to provide us prices of important horticultural crops for about 30 important markets in the country. The same prices were flashed on Hindi Pagers everyday. About four years of our experience clearly indicated, approximately 20 percent net increase in realization by the farmers for their produce.

In the last decade of 20th century, Cellular-phones were introduced. Initially their outreach was restricted to only cities and services were also very expensive. But in the beginning of 21st century, Cellular-phone services expanded many fold and became affordable.

We therefore increased our efforts and investments to develop Information Technology Applications for Agriculture Development for following areas:


•  Extension and Outreach Services
•  Internal Quality Control Services
•  Distributed Production Management Services
•  Quality and Traceability Management Services
•  Procurement Management Services
•  Decentralized Multi Level Inventory Management Services
•  Business Process Management Services such as Strategy, Productivity, Sales & Marketing, Finance, IT, etc.
•  Unified Communication Services
•  Livelihood Promotion Management Services

More:

» 1.1.1  Why Information Technology in Agriculture
» 1.1.2  Information Technology Solutions
» 1.1.3  Knowledge Management Centre