In India's e-Agriculture recent past, two efforts stand out. The first is SMS messaging (or voice messaging) involving market prices, input providers, weather forecasts tailored to geographically significant crops, and the like. Independent evaluations suggest that price and weather information that is acted upon is now reaching farmers from multiple other reliable and inexpensive channels; the novelty of SMS and canned voice messaging for younger early adopter farmers wears off, and decision making continues involve complex weights to Government data, the wisdom of elder farmers, visible early indicators, and the like. The other major push was by Government nationally, in parallel and by NGOs within their own institutes, to network their institutes by providing internet connections and computer hardware. The impact of basic infrastructure provision has not been stunning because its users are either too occupied with their routines while not being power users of remote scientific repositories, or loathe the filing of online forms, and associated overheads.

I believe that both efforts received backing because they are quick wins for their sponsors. It is as easy to broadcast SMSs as register mailing list receipients, it is more difficult to demonstrate impact from the limited general content broadcast following an evaluation. Similarly, it is easy to sanction funds for hardware as it is basic infrastructure, and overload field personnel with data entry and research directives.

There is a lot of potential to engage in user-centered design. Several Governments do not speak this language still, nonetheless.

Strategic documents are only useful where they voice the actual intent of those who will act with reference to them. With too many stakeholders, or very ambitious near-term objectives by those who operate in different real frames of reference, a dilution of the document results. Any such document is likely to communicate little by virtue of it being too broad.

A strategic plan that is developed bottom up, from an understanding of the ground realities of execution and anticipated execution, situated in real environments, is likely to make for a good reference. Where exisiting stakeholders strategic objectives are taken as the basis for the National Strategy, it is likely to valuable as a guiding document too. An empowered, funded oversight body is likely to be able to translate strategy into directives.

For voice and data services to reach almost every corner of the world, resilient lastmile wireless and backhaul networks have been built and are being upgraded. An extraordinary zeal has been demonstrated by private players to license spectrum and finance infrastructure. Several Governments have successfully created national strategies and have provided incentives that have ensured that rural connectivity has kept up, at least for voice and data at yesteryear speeds; this is evident in India and Australia, two markets that I have some familiarlity with.

The provision of producer-aggregator discovery and linkages, inputs and produce availability by quality, price information, finance and warehouse services, to mention a few, over these networks, that Mr Maru is referring to, is more a matter of educating farmers about their options for finance and storage, including insurance, gaurantees and other Government schemes, the reliability of advice surrounding recommended testing, fertilizers and appropriate pesticide management, post-harvest handling and the like.

Often opportunities for contract farming, extension for exceeding produce quality miniumums against contracts or for export, are inadequately communicated to farmers and cooperatives have not spontaneously flourished. Any digital network can only hope to faciliate transmission of information, to inform, through intermediaries, as several farmers are unable to interpret written technical information.

Greater benefits from any e-agriculture strategy will result where actual data on actual farm conditions and crop health, adequately sampled to be representative and demonstrably so for individual farmers, are transmitted over network infrastructure that has been developed and is being maintained by others already, reaches providers of reliable advice, viz. procurers, Government and private extension providers, the latter incentivised by contract farming or informed by export criteria, for instance. In India, a reliable and acute post harvest slump in prices is ample evidence that producers are being short changed as such a predictable fall in prices can easily be off-set from staggered sales and better storage infrastructure as is evident in several other parts of the world.

Broadcasts by SMS have engaged younger farmers for short durations but have not transformed reliable information delivery which continues to be multi-channel. Radio, television and newspapers remain important to rural farmers.

In the medium term, quantitative data on crop health, pest propogation and early warnings of disease incidence, must move from the field to lab, be diagnosed and a response coordinated, before advice and assistance flows back to the farmer. There is limited evidence of this happening in India at scale, often triggered by the Governement anticipating particularly severe losses, mobilising entire State extension systems with central coordination.

Only where farmers are involved in a quantitative data dialog with all other stakeholders in an environment of trust would the full potential of all extension infrastructure, the agricultural science establishments, multilateral cooperation, and market participants be realised. I believe a national e-Agriculture strategy should faciliate such a future. We are after all, all already connected.