Interactive website takes IT harvest to farmers

PUNE: Information from agricultural experts through an interactive website promises to serve as potent manure for farmers for a rich harvest.

Farmers across rural India can now dig up relevant demand-driven farming knowledge via aAqua.org, an initiative of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay and its partners.

From the website, Prasad Kaledhonkar got to know about the white patterns emerging on tomato plant leaves in Tamil Nadu. A farmer's daughter, Niyatee Nilesh of Thane, received advice on buying agricultural land, while Shirish from Maharashtra learnt about using waste water from the kitchen to irrigate gardens.

The website provides crop recommendations through a crop-keyboard browser. It also contains a section called "crop doctor" that explains different crop diseases through photographs.

The section "Bhav puchiye" (Ask the price) has practical use, as it displays market rates of different agricultural products from across India.

"aAqua stands for almost all questions answered," says Krithi Ramamrutham, IIT-Bombay's head at the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology.

"It used to be called Aqua. We added a small 'a' in front of it, that stands for 'almost'. We want to be as realistic as possible," he says.

For the interactive website, IIT-Bombay has brought together diverse strands. It merged Indic text input, iconic (icon or picture-based) interfaces, meaning-based search, digital libraries, community forum, and water-quality sensors.

The work required skills from diverse disciplines like e-pedagogy, multimedia content, computer-based training, education, and light databases.

"aAqua can be deployed in any domain - education and health too. It's actually a very simple idea. You and I use it for discussing other things. Here, we need more images, multi-lingual capability, a query facility, and meaning-based search," the US-returned Ramamritham said in an interview.

The aAqua.org shows up in Marathi, Hindi and English. It offers information also on crops, animals, officials' recommendations, market information and schemes for farmers. It has 940 members, 1,364 topics and 3,321 posts.

"What we have done is signing up experts from various Krishi Vigyan Kendras (the network of farm-extension services in India)," says Ramamrutham. Anyone wanting the info can sign up through a simple process and ask.

Those experts have been working in various parts of Maharashtra including Baramati, Pabal, Pune and Khed.

Work on this first prototype began in November 2003. Oddly, it started just as a course project. "We started working on it in real earnest when we saw its full potential," says Ramamurtham.

"We are now trying to scale up. Our challenge is that aAqua's reach should be larger," he adds.

IIT-Bombay used its active natural language processing lab to design the website. "We try to get most of the language translated automatically, through an intermediate language (or artificial pivot language) known as UNL or universal networking language," adds Ramamrutham, who himself grew up in an agricultural village in Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu.

Ramamrutham calls this a "great learning experience". But their work has also been recognized with the Manthan Award, an Indian prize for sites with useful content.

"We are looking to go to deeper ways to use this technology. For instance, forecasting disease, going by census and other information. We want to enlarge its scope of applicability," he said.