Pantnagar Univ,IIT’s ICT project for farmers

Professor K P Singh,who is heading the project at Pantnagar,said the team is working on selected crops of wheat,organic basmati rice,sugarcane,peas,litchi. “Collaborative capacity building of scientists from all the participating institutions was done to enable them to develop knowledge models of selected crops. After finalising the knowledge models,crop content is being prepared and uploaded in library,agrowiki and agroblog of Agropedia portal designed by IIT-Kanpur. The information provided by scientists as weekly alerts on different crops is being passed on to IIT-Bombay,which will send relevant text messages to farmers,” he said.

Under this project,eight lakh farmers across the country will be provided information on their mobile phones.

If successful,the ICAR will extend the project throughout the country in the next-phase.

According to a spokesperson of the University,“The main objective of the project is strengthening ICT arrangements in selected Krishi Vigyan Kendras.”

Vice-Chancellor B S Bisht said,“In the context of globalisation,redesigning of the existing extension system has become important and indispensable to meet the challenges faced by farmers. This could be realised by the diffusion of innovations through agricultural research among farmers .”