Mobility

February 16, 2007
BT provides Lifelines to India’s farming communities

NEW DELHI -- BT recently announced the launch of Lifelines, a phone-based information service, which provides vital information to rural communities in India key to improving their lives. The collaboration between BT, Cisco, and OneWorld charity, is in support of the UN Millennium Development Goal on digital inclusion.

Until recent ICT initiatives like Lifelines, the only source of veterinary and agricultural information available to farmers in rural India is through community meetings and agriculture extension workers. As part of the Lifelines initiative, BT, Cisco and OneWorld are enabling the rural population to access accurate and up-to-date information via a new telephone system. Farmers can now get information by telephone 365 days a year.

BT supports the project with executive leadership and funding, and has also provided commercial and technical expertise critical to making the project a success. This includes support from TechMahindra, a joint venture company in which BT has a 38 percent holding.

Convergence Plus spoke with Arun Seth, chairman, BT India, to discuss the Lifelines project, which is one of several community initiatives that BT is involved with in India. Excerpts.

Convergence Plus: Can you briefly describe the Lifelines program in India? How is it funded?

Arun Seth: Lifelines is a digital inclusion program helping rural communities in India become a part of the digital society. It is a voice-based service for village communities and helps them become part of India’s fast-growing digital society providing them information related to agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture, fisheries, dairy sciences and post harvest technologies.

Lifelines is a collaboration between BT, Cisco, and OneWorld South Asia that provides technology to impoverished communities in order to provide them with accurate and up-to-date knowledge, which is key to improving their lives. The main objective is to make the service self-sustaining at which point the service can be replicated in other vertical sectors and developing countries.

BT supports the project with executive leadership and funding, and has also provided commercial and technical expertise critical to making the project a success. This includes support from TechMahindra BT’s joint venture in India.

Cisco contributes staff, equipment, donations and funding to the project. Cisco employees from multiple business units and geographical locations came together to design, build and support the infrastructure that will enable the service, and some employees also participated in capacity building workshops held in India.

CP: What is the benefit of such programs to BT, and what does BT hope to achieve?

AS:External pressure toward sustainability is mounting for all corporates. Over 70 percent of CEOs recently surveyed by the World Economic Forum believe that mainstream investors have an increased interest in corporate citizenship. Business cannot succeed in societies that fail. By generating economic growth, creating jobs, behaving with integrity and paying taxes for example, all businesses can contribute to overall societal development.

BT’s commitment to make sustainable development happen is about managing the social and environmental issues on a voluntary basis over and above minimum regulation whilst at the same time growing shareholder value.

In response to the challenge put forward through the United Nations Millennium Development Goal on Digital Inclusion, BT decided to actively contribute to this key societal need through a defined project with clear goals and benefits. Commitment and funding for an international digital inclusion project was made by BT’s Community Support Committee in 2003, partners sought and the project brought to life.

CP: What kind of infrastructure is required and how can rural areas acquire it?

AS: Farmers call a designated number using a landline/mobile phone. The call first reaches the Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) where he/she registers the query with the help of a voice menu. The query is stored as a voice clip in a database server. A knowledge worker logs into the application through a web interface, views all the calls that are waiting for attention, and searches the FAQ database for the answers. If the knowledge worker finds the answer, it is retrieved and stored in the IVRS. If the answer is not found, the knowledge worker forwards the question to the subject matter experts. Once a response is received from any of the subject matter experts, the application alerts the knowledge worker who examines the response and if appropriate stores the answer in the database and makes it available for future queries. A voice clip of the answer is played back to the farmer when they call back to retrieve the information 24 hours later.

Farmers can also visit their nearest information kiosk to call the Lifelines service or to access a database or listen to audio clips of frequently asked questions and also to send digital photographs of diseased crops or animals for remote diagnosis by the agricultural and veterinary experts.

The Lifelines service is live in 150 villages in the Bundelkand region of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh covering a population of 750,000 people of which approx 560,000 are farmers.

A network of OneWorld employees on the ground across these villages are equipped with mobile phones to demonstrate the service in action and coach farmers to use the service.

OneWorld has project managed the project from design, market analysis and business planning through to implementation of the service. OneWorld South Asia have also managed the partnership with Tarahaat and ISAP who provide the expert agri-business and veterinary advice to answer questions posed by the farmers. Additionally OneWorld have managed the robust field-testing of the service including the briefing of kiosk owners and the farmers themselves on using the service.

The Indian Society of Agribusiness Professionals (ISAP) is providing the content and agriculture information while TARAhaat, India’s premier social enterprise, using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to deliver a broad spectrum of services and products designed for the rural and peri-urban citizens of India, is helping in implementing the service. The Lifelines project will soon be started in Shimla and Solan in Himachal Pradesh.

CP: In your opinion, what are the areas in which ICT can contribute the most?

AS: ICT can support social and economic development by transforming communication and access to information; which in turn helps bring about the powerful social and economic change needed to bring sustainable development to emerging countries and disadvantaged communities.

ICT can also change the way in which individuals interact with society as well as the manner in which society includes individuals in the evolutionary process. While various tools like the newspaper, radio, video and Internet have been helping to bridge the digital divide, recently “help lines” and SMS have become popular mediums for information dissemination due to increased availability and accessibility of fixed and mobile phones.

CP: How would it change the lives of the farmers? Will it be able to make any difference in the poverty level?

AS: There is a huge gap in rural India when it comes to timely and relevant information exchange. Farmers account for 65 percent of the workforce and many find it very difficult to get access to the sort of information they need. Lifelines is connecting communities and empowering people by facilitating the exchange of critical information among marginalised communities.

Until recent ICT initiatives like Lifelines, the only source of veterinary and agricultural information available to farmers in rural India is through community meetings and agriculture extension workers. As part of the Lifelines initiative, BT, Cisco and OneWorld are enabling the rural population to access accurate and up-to-date information via a new telephone system. Farmers can now get information by telephone 365 days a year.

Lifelines helps India’s farming communities by providing vital knowledge to those who need it the most. Lifelines is one of the most creative ways of using ICT to bring life-enhancing expertise to remote communities in a way that they can readily access.

CP: What are the challenges in implementing the program?

AS: In the sphere of voice-based agricultural advice, one competitor to Lifelines is the government-backed Kisan Call Centre (KCC). This is a nationwide toll-free Q&A system accessed via the number 1551 but only from BSNL/MTNL landlines. The service provides “real-time” responses to queries from farmers and currently averages 50,000 calls per month. KCC is very minimal in Lifelines’ target areas of implementation.

There are a couple of other agricultural-based information services in India. However, these are not phone based. These services include:

e-sagu: In eSagu, the agricultural expert delivers advice by getting the crop status in of digital photographs and other information. The farmer is charged annually on per acre basis. Presently 30 villages are covered in pilot.

DEAL: DEAL project aims to connect with many organisations, which are creating high value content for rural digital services. DEAL is a web based solution which contains all agriculture related information on their website.

CP: Where do you see this program heading five years down the line?

AS: The Lifelines project has been designed for the long term based on a sustainable business model.

In time the farmers will have to pay for the service, but in a way that they can afford and over a reasonable time period. The aim is to provide seed-corn funding to help the project get off the ground but to turn it into a sustainable program that both BT and Cisco can step away from in time. In this way the project delivers a far greater benefit than a charitable donation.

BT and Cisco also hope that the approach can be replicated in other developing countries potentially with different content – for example, to provide medical advice, advice about running a business or government information.