TCS is a leading software developer from India. It has a team working on an interesting innovative prodject to help farmers in India.
TCS’ mKrishi has been developed to provide personalised information and expert advice to rural farmers in their local language using sensor technology. It is also adaptable to illiterate farmers to make a query from a cell phone using voice-specific functions.
This project is truly revolutionary — it goes farther than most similar projects do. Two aspects that are unique and may have long-term serious implications far beyond agriculture are placing of sensors in fields to capture context of the farmer and use of mobile phones — including cameras in those — to interact with an advisor. When a farmer sends a ausio-visual-textual request to an advisor, the advisor already has access to lot more than just the ‘message’ from the farmer; advisor has all context and can provide much better advise.
It is nice to see such projects take shape in India. No wonder that this project won a coveted award from WSJ last year.