Dineshkumar Singh

ICT in Social Development—Context-Sensitive Design Strategies to Develop Mobile Applications for Barefoot Animal Breeders

Cattle crossbreeding improves the breed quality and milk yield of the progenies and hence improves the nutrition security and livelihood of the farmers. It is a complex data-intensive process and requires the animal breeder to maintain 7–10 forms having 230 data fields. Each data field may have 5–100 options to be filled in, which is a challenging task to be done on a small screen mobile phone by low-literate breeder. We followed an iterative design process to improve the overall user experience. We interacted with the end users, understood their environment, and analyzed the existing methods. We analyzed all the forms and data recorded by them in last 3 years. We analyzed major parameters like cattle species, pregnancy stages, cattle locations, etc., and based on the unique combination of these values, we defined various “contexts”. For every context and data field, we identified “context-sensitive” vocabulary (word library) extracted from the available records. So, for the selected data field, we recommended the values based on the context, from the vocabulary. During further iterations, the user choices were also learnt, and values substituted by the users, if any, against the recommendation, were added to the vocabulary. We added autocomplete suggestion feature to make it more user-friendly. We used the word usage count to rank the suggested words with the words used maximum ordered first in the recommendation. This design approach minimizes the user data entry efforts, improves the speed, and reduces error, especially by the low-literate animal breeders who are not quite comfortable with text typing on smaller screens.

Digital Inclusion for the Differentaly-abled Farmers

In July 2016, the Registrar General of India (RGI) released Census 2011 data on disabled population. Out of 2.68 crore disabled persons in India, 20% have movement disability, followed by persons with seeing and hearing disability, at 19% each. Majority of the disabled population i.e. 63.66% either do not work due to their dependency on others or are not skilled enough to do the work. Only 54.5% are literates, of which only 8.5% had attained graduates or higher levels of education. Lack of the required resources or infrastructure akin to their need, is also a key challenge. Government has launched slew of social security schemes to provide opportunities to People with Disabilities (PwDs), but challenge lies with accessing these benefits. This is especially difficult for the 69% of disabled persons from rural. Spread of mobile phone based digital technology and services have brought more transparency and awareness. Social collaboration applications like facebook, WhatsApp have become popular due to forming a close group of the people with similar disability and sharing the information about new schemes and success stories. A few disabled farmers from MP are using local language mobile app mKRISHI® CCA to manage their farms. This case study depicts how a family based collaborative approach with some training can enable a, disabled person to play a constructive role in the farming. This paper highlights the service design aspects and the delivery mechanism to achieve the same.

mKRISHI fisheries: a case study on early warning system (EWS) for disaster communication and management

Disaster implies exposure of the people or property to a given hazard and their vulnerability towards it. Fisheries sector employs 38 million people , especially marine fisheries who are sensitive to the natural hazards like cyclone or rough sea conditions. 370 million Indians residing over 8118 kms of coastline are exposed to 10% of the worlds tropical cyclones. During 1891 to 2000, 308 cyclones hit the Indian West coast, leading to loss of lives and livelihood and damaging the public infrastructure; resetting the development pace, repeatedly. Technological advancements like Remote Sensing, Data Analytics and weather models have improved the accuracy of prediction of the natural hazards. Communication technologies such as mobile phones are spreading too and have become affordable. Hence, such revolution in Information generation and Communication technology has increased the hope of identifying the hazards in advance, their impact region (exposure) and the people / property vulnerability towards it. mKRISHI® Fisheries used the Wind and Wave information generated by INCOIS and using the service design concept, simplified the delivery of information to local language on mobile phones. Such communication helped fishers, their family and other stakeholders to identify the risk zones, their occurrence date and time and accordingly responded to it or re-planned their journey. This data driven planning is helping the fishers reduce the risk exposure and hence saving the lives of many fishers. We also experimented with the extension of mobile signal in the deep sea, to create a digital information highway upto 30km from the coast. This paper captures the experience, methodology followed, learning and set of recommendations, which can help develop a strategy for Early Warning System (EWS) to improve safety at sea and coastal regions.

Visual Design for Blue Ocean Services: mKRISHI® Fisheries

Fisheries sector is vital for the progress of economic and food security of the country. This sector generates a retail turnover of Rs. 28,511 crore and provides cheap animal protein to 138 million fish eaters. Every week 0.9 Million Indian fishermen from 3288 villages venture into the deep sea to catch their livelihood. Fishing is a high risk profession. Fishermen and the laborers, on the boat, face high navigational and operational risks due to the dynamic nature of sea wind, wave, and sea current. Lack of preparedness and forewarning increases the risk of human life and also increases risk involved in losing the boat, fishing gears and nets. Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) generates Ocean State Forecast (OSF) information like Potential Fishing Zone (PFZ) advisories and remote sensing images for Wind direction and Wave height which helps fishermen to plan their trip. An ICT based solution was required to disseminate such high tech information to low literate fishermen. To overcome these factors, mKRISHI® Fisheries a mobile based Early Warning system (EWS) was designed. This paper captures the service design concepts like Interaction design, visual design and content development used to design a very powerful Early Warning system (EWS) for the fishermen in Maharashtra.

Innovation for crop quality certification using ICT

The focus of Indian agriculture so far has been on meeting the national demand, however it is going through a steady transformation phase to address the global requirement and is being driven by consumers and markets. According to APEDA Agriexchange portal, every year our country suffers more than 17000 Cr losses because consignments get rejected [1]. There is a growing concern for the food quality and scrutiny of the food supply chain [2] due to increased use of pesticides and its impact on health [3]. As a result, awareness of the importance of safe food is rapidly increasing among the consumers worldwide. Global standards like Global GAP (Good Agriculture Practices) [4], Better Cotton Initiative, RTRS (Round Table Responsible Soy) etc. have evolved with the collaborative efforts of growers, industry experts, researchers and retailers around the globe. These certifications contain standardized processes for producing fresh food resulting in good quality and environment sustainability. These mostly involve audit and documentation processes, in English, with Site Inspectors and Auditors visiting the field and recording their observations on paper. Hence the scalability is a challenge and the adoption is low.

ICT platform for Climate Change Adaptation in agriculture

Climate change is now more visible in the form of frequent changes in the weather patterns leading to severe drought or floods. It endangers the food security, especially shrinking of cultivable land and increasing population. Agricultural Research Institutes are working on new cropping patterns, new heat and flood tolerant varieties and cultivation practices. However in the absence of sound knowledge extension system the results of such massive and costly research do not reach its end users, in this case farmers, on time. This research paper talks about the, National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) pilot conducted to develop strategies to enhance Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change in vulnerable regions in India. As part of this research, extensive field demonstrations and data analysis were done to demonstrate how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can play a crucial role in establishing a two way connect between the Research Lab and the end users of research. While Agricultural research can focus on identification of current and future risks to livelihoods due to climatic variability and development or identification of regional climate specific crop varieties and crop practices, the IT and ICT can work jointly to use the outcome of such research to spread awareness and promote the use of such varieties and practices in adaptation by farmers and other stakeholders through an ICT platform.

mKRISHI BAIF: Digital transformation in livestock services

In todays world digital transformation is the necessity of almost every business which is in pursuit of growth, expansion, quality and sustainability. In India, at rural locations, Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF) provides cow and buffalo breed improvement services through Artificial Insemination (A.I.) to over 2.5 million families per year [1]. BAIF provides better breeding service through trained field agents. Agents use a register to capture the A.I. activity details, plan for each post A.I. activity and generate paper based reports. There was a need for digital solutions that could replace paper based process and implement quick data entry, auto activity planning, follow up, real time monitoring and reporting. mKRISHI BAIF a mobile based solution was developed for agents, who belong to the rural category, are less educated and are not tech savvy. This solution enabled the agents to digitize data entry and easily plan for its co-related activities. Till date, agents are using this solution for 17000+ farmers and 40000+ cattles across 300+ villages. This paper captures the experience gained while designing the application for rural centric livestock domain, challenges faced in the process and how these were resolved.