LifeLines – Communications Technology Bridges the Digital Divide

Organisation Name

BT plc

Problem

Over 65% of India's working population are farmers living mainly in remote areas and make up a significant proportion of the country's economy. 

Farmers are faced with daily challenges of crop failure, disease and animal illness.  Help and advice is not readily available and veterinary or agricultural experts are expensive and a great distance away.  Communications facilities are poor and livelihood-critical advice is beyond the reach of most farmers. 

Although the Indian government offers agribusiness grants for some farmers, the lack of communication infrastructure prevents them from accessing it and receiving critical support.

Solution

BT partnered with OneWorld - a charitable organisation working to promote human rights and sustainable development across the globe - and its commercial partner Cisco, to create a telephone-based information service to enable farmers to record a question and within a short period, retrieve a recorded reply from an expert in that field.

Calls are sent over a digitally engineered routing platform to a knowledge worker who examines the database for existing answers and if not found, routes the question through an interactive voice response function to an expert based anywhere across India.  A response is given and the caller can access his/her answer through a PIN code within 24 hours.  In addition, villagers with access to the village kiosk (with Internet link) can send digital photos of diseased crops or animals for remote diagnosis.

Coverage is now almost 1000 villages totalling five million people and generates around 4000 calls per month (cost: 5 Rupees each). This is scheduled to increase to 3,000 villages and 15 million people by 2010.  Currently around 40,000 Frequently Asked Questions are available for the knowledge workers to reference.  Local Ek Dunya fellows, who are responsible for information sharing amongst villagers, make their mobile phones available to farmers and assist them with the call.

The initial focus for the programme was to bring the combined expertise and funding from BT and Cisco together with OneWorld to support the UN Millenium Goal on Digital Inclusion.  The project has extended to be a fully sustainable business model, whereby local partners now utilise the technical platform in order to deliver other applications, including an education application.

Constraints

• Lengthy development and set up service (three years) as it ground breaking technology used that involved many stakeholders and partners
• Complexity of scale in developing country population
• The innovative nature of this partnership was new to the agricultural partners and required a mindset change

Benefits

• Bringing critical shared advice to farmers at very minimal cost helps empower the local and national economy
• Farmers have reported an increase in product quality and productivity leading to a profit of between 25% and 150%
• Can be replicated in other developing countries

Place Of Implementation

United Kingdom and India

More Information

LifeLines India on BT's website

Year Of Submission

2007

Themes

Innovation
Entrepreneurship

Solution Champion

Please login to view this information