Indian farming community is in crisis and facing a multitude of problems for increasing the efficiency of crop production. One of the reasons is that expert/scientific advice regarding crop cultivation is not reaching farming community in a timely manner. Due to several reasons the current agricultural extension system in India is unable to deliver the advice to the farming community in an efficient manner. Without having access to credible advice, the farmers are following unscientific cultivation practices mostly guided by pesticide vendors. As a result, the farmers (majority of them are illiterate) are applying wrong, untimely, unnecessary, and excessive pesticides and fertilizers. The net result is very devastating for farmers, environment, and public health. For farmers, they are facing severe crisis due to reduced crop output or crop failure. The environment is being polluted. Also, indiscriminate application of pesticides is harming natural enemy population and other non-target organisms, which is leading to ecological imbalance. Most important, consumption of such farm produces that contains pesticide residues lead to severe health related problems. Moreover, it is difficult to get high price for such products in both domestic and international markets. So we have to use all the resources at our disposal to resolve this problems.
In this situation, by exploiting advances in Information Technology, we are making efforts to develop an IT-based personalized agriculture extension system (eSagu) to improve agricultural productivity by disseminating a fresh expert agricultural advice to the farmers, both in a timely and personalized manner.
The following are the phases of eSagu: