aAqua - Translation for farmers
aAqua stands for Almost All Questions Answered. It is a multilingual online question and answer forum developed by IIT Mumbai.
It is deployed successfully in 11 kiosks covering 44 villages (supported by Ministry of Communications and IT, Development Gateway Foundation and an ICT R&D grant awarded to us by the Pan Asia group) since December 2003. The farmers of Pabal and the vicinity are aware of the aAQUA Q&A forum and have sent more than 850 questions so far with total number of posts exceeding 2000. Farmers in Pune district and around use aAQUA forums on a regular basis in aAQUA clubs. Kiosk operators charge farmers Rs 10 per query for the consultancy. Almost all of the questions have been answered in the local language (Marathi) with English answers given to people posting from outside the state. Local farmers trust the aAQUA service and are sensitive to the time it takes for the answers to arrive (current average is 1.2 days). The key to their success is that their technology enables services with people residing where they are, leveraging existing skill sets and minimizing the need of a separate team. This makes the aAQUA service scalable by stakeholders including the government, NGOs and Agri-business companies. In the current deployment farmers have to approach kiosks to send their questions. Plans for having farmers questions answered at their farm are being firmed up in Nagpur and Yeotmal Districts.
posted by Hitesh Parashar @ 11:19 AM
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