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Please help us to introduce Saligaonet to more people in/from the village, who
would like to keep in touch...
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My sincere apologies for posting an article which has nothing to do with
the village, but could surely be relevant here. Kindly visit aaqua.org
and see how the information there could help make the village a better
place! FN
aAqua, taking a harvest of IT solutions to the Indian farmer
By Frederick Noronha
PUNE (Maharashtra), March 18: Link some down-to-earth
agricultural experts, add an interactive website, allow them
to cut across the language divide. Mix all this together, and
it serves as a potent manure that promises the Indian farmer
a rich yield of useful knowledge.
Thanks to work of IIT-Bombay and its many partners, IT-savvy
knowledge-hungry infomediaries across rural India can dig up
relevant demand-driven farming knowledge via aAqua.org.
Expert Prasad Kaledhonkar could have a clue about the white
patterns emerging on tomato plant leaves in Tamil Nadu.
Farmer's daughter Niyatee Nilesh of Thane, Maharashtra wants
advice on buying agricultural land. Shirish from rural
Maharashtra wants to learn about using waste water from the
school kitchen to irrigate gardens or crops.
There's also crop recommendations archived by keywords, a
crop-keyboard browser (to see if questions have already been
answered), and a 'crop doctor' with photographs for diseased
crops archived by keywords.
'Bhav puchiye' ('ask the price') has practical use. Market
rates from across India are displayed for farmers and
agro-traders.
aAqua stands for "almost all questions answered". Says
IIT-Bombay's head at the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information
Technology Dr Krithi Ramamrutham: "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."
First, diverse strands had to be brought together.
To get a solution that works in the field, IIT-Bombay merged
Indic text input, iconic (icon or picture-based) interfaces,
meaning-based search, digital libraries, community fora, and
water-quality sensors. This work brought in 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," US-returned Prof Ramamritham told this IANS in an
interview.
aAqua.org shows up several fora in Indian languages (Marathi
and Hindi currently) and English. These deals with crops,
animals, officials' recommendations, market information and
schemes for farmers. It now has 940 members, 1364 topics, and
3321 posts.
"What we've done is sign-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.
They've been working in an area in the central Indian state
of Maharashtra around the Baramati, Pabal, Pune, Khed areas.
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," he told
IANS.
"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.
"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.
Ramamrutham himself grew up in a village in Thanjavur, South
India. He studied in the IIT, moved to the US (at Utah), then
returned home in 1998.
Ramamrutham calls this a "great learning experience". But,
their work has also been recongised by the Manthan Award, an
Indian prize for sites with useful content.
Says he: "We're looking for going to deeper ways to use this
technolgy. For instance, forecasting disease, going by census
and other information. We want to enlarge its scope of
applicability."
Pune's metrology department sees its own use for this.
MarathiWorld.com could use it to answer career counselling
queries. Drishtee, a North India project, sees potential in
this being a citizens' complaints system. (ENDS)
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