E-krishi, Kerala State IT Mission's ((KSITM) online agri-business network, is making waves in the state with the pilot project in Malapuram district receiving tremendous response.

Emboldened by the initial success in Malapuram, e-krishi would be expanded to seven more districts - Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Ernakulam, Thrissur, Kozhikode, Kannur and Kasargod - in Kerala by April.

Launched in January last year, e-krishi is a project for setting up a network of farming communities in Kerala, which have access to information on market demand, prices, good agricultural practices and quality agricultural inputs.

The e-networking has been made possible by Akshaya centres, which provide ICT-based citizen-friendly services in various panchayats. There are around 400 operational Akshaya centres in Malapuram district alone.

The project has already established a network of 7,000 farmers and 10,000 farmers and buyers have registered with the portal for buying and selling, according to Anvar Sadath, manager, e-governance and head of e-krishi at Kerala State IT Mission.

A toll-free call centre (1800-425-1661) has also been set up which is manned by three post-graduate students of agriculture. This project was supported by KISSAN, a project of Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala and Kerala Agriculture Department. A Kerala-based call center was necessitated because the Central government's toll-free call centre 1551 did not cater to trade-related queries with its emphasis on multinational aspect, Sadath said.

E-krishi, originally conceptualised as a trade portal for agriculture to facilitate buying, selling and market information has now become a comprehensive agricultural portal with the integration of KISSAN and VUAT.

KISSAN is an agricultural portal maintained by state agriculture department and IIITM-K that provides the best cultivation practices of crops cultivated in Kerala. They have been airing a highly popular farm programme, Krishideepam on Asianet which has now completed over 160 episodes. Virtual University for Agricultural Trade is a portal run by Kerala Agricultural University that is connected to WTO.

KSITM has also come up with Haritha Keralam, an interactive CD on agriculture that provides information on 30 major crops of Kerala spread across 500 topics.
E-krishi has also signed an MoU with Multi-Commodity Exchange (MCX) to disseminate price information on agriculture products.

Among the major crops covered under the e-krishi include paddy, coconut, arecanut, cashew, vegetables, banana, rubber, vanilla, medicinal plants, honey, etc.

However, KSITM officials said implementing the online programme in Malapuram has not been a smooth affair. Bringing all stake-holders together involved a lot of field work. Field work is required in the other seven districts where the programme is to be implemented.

Until the farmers and buyers become computer-savvy the project could not succeed. Farmers, agricultural officers and buyers still prefer printed materials to searching online or using CDs. Even when information is made available on portal and CDs, farmers request a hard copy for reference at home.

From the government's side, the stake-holders of e-krishi expect the APMC Act to be passed soon as in other states. In the absence of such a legislation, the middlemen cannot be bypassed as sellers cannot directly deal with the buyers.

E-krishi is funded under the United Nations Development Programme and supervised by National Institute of Smart Governance, Hyderabad, which implements 14 such projects in seven states. NISG officials who recently visited Malapuram had expressed satisfaction with the progress of the project.

In Kerala, unlike other states, the farmer is not satisfied with price information alone which he gets through newspapers, radio and TV. But the challenge is to ensure better price discovery and delivery mechanisms. At present, there are no user charges for e-krishi.

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