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Boosting yields and fighting crop failure with ICT in rural Sri Lanka
When the local farmers from Embilipitiya showed up at Bimal Prasad’s office, the eggplant samples they were carrying weren’t pretty. Covered in pockmarks left by an unknown pest, the vegetables were ruined and the farmers were desperate. “Seventy five percent of output is vanished,” Bimal explained. The farmers needed answers if they were going to save their crops and have enough income to make it through the year.
Luckily for the farmers, they came to the right place. Bimal Prasad is not an agriculture expert. Rather he is a community ICT provider. Bimal offers ICT training programs for young people, communications services to the villagers around Embilipitya, and — in the case of these farmers — a lifeline to the government office providing agricultural support.
After seeing their samples from the ruined crop of eggplant, known as bringal in Sinhalese, Bimal took photographs with his digital camera, emailed those photos as attachments to Mr. Rohan at the government agricultural resource center, and waited with the farmers in the telecenter for a reply. Mr. Rohan soon rang by mobile phone, and the advice was dispensed: use a particular pesticide, and if you continue to have problems come back and we will try another option. It worked.
Telecenters as magnets for farming families
South Asian farmers have traditionally used each other, and government advisors, as resources for improved crop yields and market planning. But as farming techniques become more sophisticated, as transportation grows more costly with rising fuel prices, and as big farmers consolidate agricultural land into fewer hands, it becomes harder for small farmers to compete. A drought, blight, or infestation can devastate their income. New crop rotation techniques and other agricultural information can help.
The expansion of telecenters in rural South Asia has provided farmers with an important resource for accomplishing this: information and communication technologies. The bringal farmers were able to photograph, report, and discuss their infestation problem with invaluable visual aids — and get timely solutions. What would otherwise require an expensive, lengthy, and uncertain trip to a faraway city by bullocks cart, and the navigation of complex government bureaucracy once there, can now be accomplished with a few clicks (the shutter, the mouse, and the receiver) among other important inputs such as basic ICT skills, knowledgeable and trusted infomediaries and other social infrastructure.
This is not an unusual case. On recent research visits to five remote rural telecenters in southern India and Sri Lanka, a similar story consistently emerged: telecenters can act as a magnet to draw in farmers, anchor social spaces conducive to knowledge sharing and promote critical information exchanges that enhance crop security. According to Bimal Prasad, in his telecenter alone “an average of ten farmers come every mon