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Agriculture - Ask the
Expert Service
Pravin Mallick &
Anjani Kumar
I n
the new millennium, the challenges before the farming community are
quite different from those of previous decades. The enormous pressure to
produce more food from less land with shrinking natural resources is a
tough task for the farmers. Low yield and high costs of cultivation have
only complicated the situation further.
One of the key challenges
towards keeping up the momentum of growth in agriculture would be to
make the agricultural extension more effective and more farmers
oriented. It is essential to supplement the efforts of the Government
Extension System if we want to meet the above challenges.
TARAhaat’s web based “Ask
the Expert” Service is geared towards meeting these needs. The primary
aim of the service is to connect people in rural villages of India to
the information they require.
About Ask the Expert
“Ask the Expert” is a web based,
off-line synchronised engine for query redressal services.
The objectives of
this service are:
| 1 |
An off-line synchronized web based
collaboration system that allows rural villagers to submit their
queries to specialists in agricultural and allied activities. |
| 2 |
To provide the archived database
for multiple uses by farmers and academia. |
How is “Ask the Expert” unique?
|
Some of the key features that make
the service unique: |
| 1 |
Farmer friendly Iconic Interface |
| 2 |
Structured Query for precise
answers |
| 3 |
Region specific Mail transfer |
| 4 |
An archived database of regional
information |
| 5 |
A generic engine working from
agriculture to education to medicine |
| 6 |
Off-line to overcome connectivity
hurdles |
| 7 |
Transcending language and regional
barriers |
The Ask the Expert engine is multilingual and can be operated in as many
as 11 languages.
From The Development Team
Ask the Expert is a multilingual
Unicode based query redressal system. The system works on Phonetic
keyboard for the user to put in his queries.
The system is completely
distributed with database residing at different levels (local database
at each TARA Kendra) and the central database at the server.
Off-line working ability of the
system is through a technology developed in-house, named - System for
Passive Synchronization on Distributed Architecture (SPSDA).
The simulator can be
seen live by linking to www.tarahaat.com and clicking on channels
or www.devalt.org/asktheexpertforserver with Guest account as
AteGuestUid and password as AteGuestPwd. The detailed documentation and
presentation is available at the entry page of the site.q
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