In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.

Social software - email, blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks - has revolutionized how people learn and share expertise on the web, but the Internet and its associated access technologies (broadband connectivity, PCs) are out of reach for much of rural India. Even if Internet-connected PCs were available, widespread usage is constrained by language and literacy barriers. But while computers are unaffordable or unfamiliar to rural communities, mobile phones are not.

Avaaj Otalo ("voice-based community forum") is a system for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. The system was designed in the summer of 2008 as a collaboration between IBM India Research Laboratory and Development Support Center (DSC), an NGO in Gujarat, India.

By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record questions, review and respond to others, or access content published by agricultural experts and institutions. In addition to the Q&A forum, Avaaj Otalo includes an announcements board of headline-like snippets updated regularly by DSC staff, and a radio archive to listen to past episodes of DSC's popular weekly radio program.

Avaaj Otalo is currently a live pilot deployment with 50 farmers throughout Gujarat. There were 3,500 hits to the system in the first month. Based on the enthusiastic response, the application will soon be launched to serve over 500,000 farmers across the state.

Neil Patel
Sheetal Agarwal, Anupam Jain, Nitendra Rajput, Amit Nanavati, Arun Kumar (IBM World Wide Telecom Web group)
Paresh Dave, Sachin Oza (Development Support Center)
Tapan Parikh
Scott Klemmer

Audio-visual presentation, audio transcript

IBM India Research Laboratory

Neil Patel (neilp at cs dot stanford dot edu)