Information and Communication Technologies in Agriculture: Ikisan's offerings to the Indian Farming Community 'Exploring the Frontiers'

摘要

Ikisan Limited, a company belonging to Nagarjuna Group brought together agricultural information, knowledge and business requirements of various players in agriculture to improve the cost-benefit ratio in agricultural production. This initiative of Ikisan is based on the fact that there are substantial gaps between the actual and potential productivity, quality and costs of production in agriculture due to lack of information and providing appropriate information can help in bridging these gaps. Ikisan hosts a comprehensive agricultural information portal (at www. ikisan. com) which provides both static and dynamic information on crops, commodity prices, weather, market information, and problem solving mechanisms in an easy to understand format for farmers and other players. The information provided is appropriate for specific localized situations and is available in English and five Indian languages. The portal gets approximately 40,000 hits per day on an average, which represents a good interest and response from stakeholders of the agricultural sector and makes it one of the foremost agri-info portals. In addition to this, Ikisan has considerable experience in conceiving, designing and implementing turnkey projects. Offerings and results of such initiatives of Ikisan will be discussed in detail in this paper.