The presentation speaks about diverse information need, level of information literacy of Indian agrarian community and need of local knowledge bank to meet up the need.

1. Community Information Service to Enhance
Information Literacy and Develop Local
Knowledge Bank for Agrarian Community of
India: A Perspective View
Moumita Ash
Librarian, Vidyasagar College for Women
&
Prof. Pijushkanti Panigrahi
Department of Library & Information Science, University of
Calcutta
IASLIC 30th All India Conference 2015
on
Library Legislation and Community Information Services
28th-31st December,2015

2. Agrarian Community
Agrarian community is related with the
science or practice of farming, including
cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops
and the rearing of animals to provide food,
wool, and other products.
As their live hood is bonded with nature as
well society, the geography and societal
conditions are the key factors to information
need and knowledge system.

3. Recent Trends in Agricultural Live hood
• Sustainable Agriculture
• Community Supported Agriculture

4. Recent Trends in Agricultural Live hood….
• Urban Farming
• Buy Fresh, Buy Local

5. Agrarian Community in India
• Indian agriculture began by 9000 BCE
• Diverse agro-based ethnic communities with their
living legacy
• Still Agriculture is demographically the broadest
economic sector
• Average literacy rate in rural India is 68.9% (as per
2011 Census data)
• Tele Density in rural areas is 48.66% and wireless
subscriber is 48.10% (TRAI report on 1st September
2015)

6. Agricultural Diversity
Example: West Bengal

7. Agricultural Information System

8. Government Initiatives
• National Portal of India – Agriculture
http://india.gov.in/topics/agriculture (English
& Hindi)
• FARMERS’ PORTAL http://farmer.gov.in/
• Agmarknet http://agmarknet.nic.in/
• Seednet India http://seednet.gov.in/
• National Agricultural Biocomputing Portal
http://webapp.cabgrid.res.in/biocomp/

9. Government Initiatives……
• Kishan Call Centre 1800 180 1551
• mKishan http://mkisan.gov.in/
• DACNET http://www.dacnet.nic.in/

11. Kissan Kerala: A CIS

12. Non-Governmental Initiatives
E-Choupal is an initiative of ITC Limited, a
conglomerate in India, to link directly with
rural farmers via the Internet. The programme
installs computers with Internet access in rural
areas of India to offer farmers up-to-date
marketing and agricultural information.

13. Non-Governmental Initiatives

14. Where is the gap?
• Farming in India is still depends upon traditional agriculture
system. As RML (formerly Reuters Market Light), Feb 2015,
“Indian farmers need reliable agriculture information and
alternate marketing channels
• 94% of farmers in India depend upon ‘fellow farmers’ as
the preferred source of information, followed by 10% on
agriculture retailers, 4% of TV/Radio and only 3% on agri-
extension officers.
• Lingual barrier
• Lack of ICT Infrastructure for public access
• Very low rate of Information Literacy
• Diverse Agriculture System & Need of Localization of
Community Information Service

15. How to bridging the gap & meet up the
requirement?
Application of Social Networking to communicate &
express community needs

16. How to bridging the gap & meet
up the requirement?
http://www.ais.gov.bd/

17. Need to Develop Local Agricultural
Knowledge Bank
Indian Context
• Diverse geographical location and agricultural
system
• Community memory based knowledge
transfer tradition
• Absence of documentation of traditional
agricultural knowledge system
• Distance of agrarian community with modern
agricultural knowledge transfer system

18. Community Participation in
Knowledge Bank Development
• Participate to archive the traditional
knowledge by using audio visual technology
and web medium
• Participate in new knowledge generation
• Participate in community information
dissemination programme –example
community radio programme
• Interactive feed back mechanism

19. Application of ICT to fulfill the Explicit
and Implicit Information Need of
Agrarian Community
• Use of m-technology - SMS, mail service, voice
message
• Use of Social Media like ‘facebook’, ‘twitter’,
‘Pinterest’, ‘Instragram’ with web-analytics like
‘Simply Measured’ to easily maintain local
User Database with detail Information Seeking
Behaviour data.

20. Community Participation in
Knowledge Bank Development

21. Role of Librarians
• Bridge between agrarian community and
existing knowledge
• Provide personal assistance for information
retrieving
• Provide information regarding their daily
information need – market information,
cultivation problems
• Arrange information literacy programme

22. Role of Librarians…
• Identify the local information need by user survey
in regular interval
• Explore the indigenous knowledge and extract as
well as archive with contemporary technology
• Arrange user awareness programme and user
meet up programme
• Develop interactive user feedback mechanism by
using social networking, mobile technology also
use local languages as communication and User
Interface Language

23. Conclusion
In India, formal, modern technology based
agricultural information system need to be
established and localization of agricultural
information system will be the most prime
one.

24. Thank You