When disease strikes their crops, don’t be surprised if farmers in Maharashtra fish out their cellphones and start punching out an SMS. Chances are they are messaging IIT, Bombay for answers.

In a step forward from its multi-lingual web portal aAQUA (almost all questions answered), which answers agriculture and animal husbandry-related questions, IIT-Bombay has now put in place a software where registered farmers can have their queries answered on a mobile phone without having to go to a kiosk or cyber-cafe.

“We realised that the Internet is not penetrating as fast as we thought. Also recent numbers indicate that the rate of rise of mobile phone penetration is higher in rural areas. So we decided to make use of this phenomenon to reach out to maximum number of farmers,” says IIT-B Research and Development Dean Krithi Ramamritham.

In initial research, the institute determined how many agricultural households had access to Internet connection, the type of mobiles they possessed, the functions they used in a cellphone and the kind of information they needed. One of the findings, for example, was that while a vast majority of farmers in the state used mobile phones, the grape farmers owned the high-end ones.

Subsequently, the SMS service was started by IIT-B four months ago.

To avail of the service, all the registered users had to do was update their aAQUA profile with a mobile number, and then direct their questions to a number provided by the institute. Currently, farmers across the country use the portal, with over 60 per cent from Maharashtra.

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