(Circa: 2005 Setting: Countryside-villagers, vegetation, huts, a well, a goat, and a handcart.)
First man: 'Hey, listen! Our market's Agmarknet Centre is churning out free price info from India's other markets.'
Second man: "Yeah, I got the price from the Centre and am goin' to sell my crop in another market where I'm gettin' more rate than our local market.'
Third man: 'Hmm! I never knew that. I've sold my crop at a lower price.'

This scene happened on the back cover of an Agmarknet brochure. And this is the nearest translation, as the dialogs were in Hindi.

The men in the scene are trying to highlight the utility of Agmarknet (Agricultural Marketing Research & Information Network)-a Web-based service that's supposed to inform farmers on wholesale prices of various commodities, among other agricultural details. Incidentally, these men are not real but cartoon characters. What's the reality is anybody's guess.

That's because the network is spreading its tentacles in almost every nook of the country, but its actual utility is not being measured-at least not by the government organizations holding its reigns. It's being run as a turnkey project by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and is sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture. "NIC has not yet done any impact analysis in quantifiable terms,' admits N Vijayaditya, director general, NIC, "We need to do that."

The network scope
Now covering over 1,000 agricultural markets in the country, Agmarknet would go to another 2,000 or so during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period, ending 2007. Eventually, it plans to have its footprint in all the 7,000 wholesale or principal markets and 34,000 rural markets. It includes nearly 300 commodities-with 2,000 varieties-categorized as cereals, pulses, oil seeds, fruits, vegetables, poultry products, and others. It's a computer-based network that primarily uses Internet for connectivity (see box: How It Works).

"It's a huge e-governance project aimed to empower the farmers so that they could leverage the power of information to progress in the emerging trade environment and contribute toward economic development," says Vijayaditya. There's no denying that farmers' empowerment would benefit a country like India where the agriculture sector contributes 25% to the GDP, employs more than half of its total workforce, and generates 15% export earnings. Obviously, all possible resources would be deployed to strengthen the farming activity. And digital infrastructure is one of them.

Where's the strategy
However, it's not going to be a walk in the park especially in the absence of a game plan to execute the Agmarknet project on such a large scale. First, during all these years, the government didn't feel the need to analyze its usefulness by collecting any empirical feedback from the target consumers-farmers. "Its impact can be measured by conducting farm-level surveys, which is not going to be an easy task considering the enormity of the work involved,' says Sunil Khairnar, CEO, Agriwatch.com, an independent agribusiness services entity based in New Delhi.

Next, the project doesn't seem to have the right business approach to increase its acceptability, though huge money is being pumped into the new infrastructure for extending Agmarknet's reach. For example, there's no model in place to calculate the return on investment. "Being a government-funded public project to provide information infrastructure to citizens, there's hardly any need to measure tangible returns on investment," says Vijayaditya. "However, we believe that there are enormous indirect benefits of Agmarknet in terms of improving the quality of life for the Indian farmers." But without any data to support this fact, it sounds more like a disguised political statement.

Similarly, the business model for the kiosk operators is also not clear. At present, mostly the NGOs or self-help groups are running such information centers. "We are offering free service to the consumers," says M Moni, deputy director general, NIC. But if the government wants to generate employment opportunity for villagers around Agmarknet, it needs to develop and promote a suitable pricing model for its services and a viable revenue model for the operators. Only then the project will stand on its feet and have a long, self-sustained life. "In a feasible business model, the government can handle the content creation work for Agmarknet and private parties can disseminate information using various communication means,' suggests Khairnar. "It can run successfully in a public-private partnership mode."

The success of the project is also directly proportional to the literacy and awareness levels of the farmers. However, there's hardly any systematic attempt to overcome these bottlenecks. Among the alternatives could be the professionally designed outreach programs for promoting the service and offering information using blended methods-Internet and off-Net. Such schemes need to come out of the pipeline, if at all they're there.

Overall, if the entire Agmarknet affairs are not handled with care, the project will surely meet the fate of its poor cousins that failed to deliver for want of strategy. One of them, for example, was the government's CLASS (Computer Literacy and Studies in Schools) project. Launched in the 1980s, it was supposed to spread computer literacy among school children in the country. While it could distribute many computers in schools, it failed to spread the desired levels of literacy. Finally it was shelved, though it consumed a whole lot of public money.

A recent one was Vidya Vahini project that planned to use e-channels to spread uniform quality of education starting with government-run schools in India. After doing some pilot cases in a few schools, it went into a state of perpetual hibernation.

However, Agmarknet would prefer to meet its objectives of strengthening the market information system and help farmers realize maximum payback on the sale of their crops.

The path ahead
By tradition and necessity, the Indian farmers have been living in an exploitable state. They don't even get the right monetary return on their investment in terms of cash and labor. For example, they get just 25%, as NIC quotes, of the retail price for their farm produce, while their counterparts in the developed countries earn up to 80%. That's because the middlemen here gobble up most part of the money earned. "A technology-driven facility like Agmarknet will remove these middlemen layers and get the farmers their dues," says Moni. "The immediate target is to help farmers double their earnings from the current 25% of the retail price," he adds.

It would be a great achievement. But considering the present state of affairs, it seems an uphill task. Today, the focus of the government is to expand the network, but the rigors of the rural environment are coming as quite a shock. "Connectivity, power supply, local language and education are among the major issues that slow down the pace of technology introduction in rural areas," says Vijayaditya.

While hybrid networks-combination of wired and wireless-are supposed to be an answer to the connectivity problem, non-conventional power-generation systems like paddle power are being considered to supply uninterrupted energy for running the computer systems.

"At present, NIC is offering four language interfaces including Hindi and English on the Agmarknet site. It plans to develop it in 15 languages by the end of this year," says Moni. The lower literacy level is a major bottleneck because of which the farmers are not able to avail the Agmarknet facility. This can be overcome by creating iconic and voice interfaces among other measures. According to NIC, the plans are afoot.

NIC is also considering joining hands with mobile carriers for providing instant commodity prices and other related information to farmers over SMS. A voice-enabled service would help the uneducated farmers know the latest details over their mobile phones. Television is another medium being explored. Of course, such services are expected to have a direct interface with Agmarknet to cull out important data. And the government should ensure that the data is updated regularly on the server. At present, it's learned, about one-fourth of the automated markets are supplying data. "Government can use carrot-and-stick treatment to collect data from other locations," says Khairnar. "The markets that provide information regularly can be rewarded."

Agmarknet can take cues from private sector projects-such as ITC's e-Chopal or Tata Chemicals' Tata Kisan Sansar-to improve its service. One area, for example, could be the automation of complete supply chain covering farmers, traders, processing units, retailers, and consumers. According to NIC, the government has conceptualized such a project called Seednet, which will be a sort of extension to Agmarknet and NIC will develop it. Likewise, there could be other areas where NIC can join hands with external organizations while augmenting its services around the network.

Now it's time for Agmarknet to emerge as a thorough facility that's more than a voyage of personal discovery for a handful of government partners. Only then its benefits would ripple out across the Indian farming community. And that's the whole point.

Rakesh Raman The author is an independent technology journalist and market analyst.

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