Success Story

Reaching the Unreached through Video Conferencing:

The Dadh is just a remote village like any other typical village was lacking the basic information services. The village has only 36% area under irrigation and the rest depend upon the mercy of the rains. A few progressive farmers have taken up the cultivation of the crops like the cotton, redgram, bengalgram and other vegetables. The cotton growers face every year the onslaught of mid season pest attack that causes heavy losses for the farmers growing cotton and vegetables. Although the prices obtained for these crops are comparatively higher but due to the untimely pest attack and stormy weather conditions the cotton and vegtable growers continued to face the losses to the tune of Rs 10, 000/- to 15,000/- per acre.

The Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Babhaleshwar has devised customized online advisory services through live video conferencing sessions through which the SMSs of the KVK are able establish realtime connections and live net meeting sessions. The service is presently being provided for Dadh, Satral, Kolhar, Babhaleshwar, Loni, Rahata an Shirdi villages. Various online advisory services are being provided like technical crop information, market information and weather forecast information for the farmers of different villages. The weather forecast is based on the Aviation Model devised by the World Airport Path Finder and supported by the Falling Rain Genomics of Palo Alto, California. The site provides exclusive weather forecast conditions for any location with known latitude and longitude. The KVK has attempted to correlate the weather analysis of the AVN model and the cloud imagery from the IMD, which helps to provide us the detailed weather conditions for any location. The farmers of the Dadh and other villages growing grapes were constantly in touch with the KVK for the latest weather conditions during the grapes harvest period during last fortnight of May.

The days and time of video conferencing have been preset for every village since at the moment only one to one video conferencing is possible with available hardware and software which can be upgraded to multipoint video conferencing making 4 nodes conferencing possible. The service has been utilized by about more than 900 farmers from different villages. Most pronounced is the conspicuous presence made by the  hitherto unreached landless and resource poor farmers who are coming forward to take advantage of the KVK programmes and activities. The women self help groups remain most active in demanding technical inputs from the KVK. The KVK in turn provide all the technical trainings and demonstrations for the women self help groups. Rajendra Kerunath Chechare from Hanmantgaon and Jayaram Sukhdeo Tupe from Loni both resource poor farmers from the backward community can be seen availing the online advisory services from the KVK Similarly the farm women from various self help groups have made their appearance at every instance in the IT centers to avail the advisory services from the KVK. It was here the KVK has intervened and provided them the latest information analysis through the Internet. This has helped them to decide not to make any distress sale to the middlemen demanding produce at low prices owing to existing and possible heavy rains.

The timely information on technical aspects, market prices and weather forecast of their village have helped them to draw maximum benefits without the need to come to the KVK for seeking online advisory services through video conferencing.