What is it?
mKisan SMS Portal for farmers enables all Central and State government organizations in agriculture and allied sectors to give information/services/advisories to farmers by SMS in their language, preference of agricultural practices and location.
Users can get information on the Push SMS, Pull SMS, services, IVRS, mobile apps, etc.
About mKisan Portal – Mobile Based Services for Farmers
The project conceptualized, designed and developed in-house within the Department of Agriculture & Cooperation has widened the outreach of scientists, experts and Government officers posted down to the Block level to disseminate information, give advisories and to provide advisories to farmers through their mobile telephones.
It was inaugurated by the Hon’ble President of India in 2013
These messages are specific to farmers’ specific needs & relevance at a particular point of time and generate heavy inflow of calls in the Kisan Call Centres where people call up to get supplementary information.
To put it succinctly, almost every Government Department, Office and Organisation from the Ministry Headquarters down to the level of Block having anything to do with agriculture and allied sectors in every nook and corner of the country has been authorised to use this Portal to provide information to farmers on vast gamut of issues.
Objectives of the Portal include:
- To make SMS and other mobile based services as a tool of 2 way agricultural extension in which not only information/advisory services are provided to farmers as per his/her need in a broadcast mode (in keeping with selection of crop / agricultural practice, requirements and location) but they can also raise specific queries through Pull SMS or USSD.
- Making use of the huge spread of mobile telephony in the rural areas to cover every farm household in the country to overcome the major impediment in bringing level playing field for small and marginal farmers. Presently, there are about 38 crore mobile telephones in rural areas as against nearly 9 crore farm households.
- Centralized system wherein different modes of information flow are channelized and spread to the farmers in their own language.
- Integrated Portal to ensure proper storage in previous advisories/messages and also effective monitoring at various levels. Integration of database of farmers from the State Governments, Universities, KVKs web based registration, Kisan Call Centres etc.
- Since effective internet penetration in the rural areas is low, text messaging in the language of the farmer transcends the barriers of digital divide.
- Provision of web based services through SMS or USSD is thus the fulcrum of the whole Project.
- Integration with other farmer-centric services such as Kisan Call Centres, Common Service Centres, Web Portals for extracting relevant information and also for feeding data from remote locations where Internet is not available or is unreliable
Services under it
USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System) and Pull SMS are value added services which have enabled farmers and other stakeholders not only to receive broadcast messages but also to get web based services on their mobile without having internet. Semi-literate and illiterate farmers are also targeted to be reached by voice messages.
Unique feature of m-Kisan
The SMS Portal has unique features like database to sift farmers down to Block level & to select specific agricultural commodities/animal/bird/fish, rating/correction of messages by the supervisory officers, searchable database of previous advisories, phone number-wise status report on a dashboard, drillable & graphical dashboard, query review interface with email piping etc.
