IFPRI- CSISA organized a one day high level policy roundtable on Sustainable Intensification in India’s Risk-Prone Ecologies: Investment strategies for productivity growth, resource conservation, and climate risk management” on May 19, 2014 in New Delhi. This roundtable, brings together a high-level small group of individuals from the corporate, government, and research sectors to address one of India’s most urgent challenges to food security and economic growth—how to encourage private sector investment in accelerating productivity growth in India’s risk-prone ecologies while simultaneously conserving the environment. There are solutions already in farmers’ fields and rural markets that respond to these challenges, and this Roundtable will highlight recent advances, for example: innovative financial products and information services for small-scale farmers; diagnostic tools for managing water and soil nutrient scarcity; custom-hired resource-conserving machinery for small farms; crop diversification and high-value marketing strategies; and stress-resistant wheat and rice varieties. But the search for solutions is far from complete. This Roundtable is meant to engage participants in a rapid-fire discussion of recent technical solutions in Indian agriculture, the prospects for policy change, and corporate outlooks for the next five years. The purpose is to help public and private sector players to identify common investment strategies, forge partnerships, and chalk out collaborative efforts to effect technological, market, and policy improvements in India’s risk prone ecologies.

1. Digital Green uses simple technology and
social organization to amplify the
effectiveness of global development efforts
to improve human wellbeing

2. 2
2
Agricultural Extension
Training & Visit: Face-to-face
interactions of extension officers and
farmers
500,000 extension officers in
developing countries
Extension agent-to-farmer ratio:
1:2,600 in South Asia
1:1,800 in Sub-Saharan Africa
High recurring costs, weak
accountability, under-resourced,
limited training
Extension officer “commuting” between farms
Dissemination of expert agricultural information to farmers

3. 3
0 5 10 15 20
Others
Government demonstration
Buyer
Cooperative
Extension worker
Newspaper
Television
Radio
Salesmen (e.g., fertilizer, pesticide)
Other progressive farmers
% farm households (n = 51,770)
Main source of information about new technology and
farm practices over the past 365 days (India: NSSO 2005)
Information Sources for Farmers in India

4. 4
Video provides…
– Resource-savings: human, cost, time
– Accessibility for non-literate farmers
– Minimizes knowledge loss
Digital Video for Extension

5. 5
7 times more adoptions over Training &
Visit model
15 months:
13 villages, 3 nights a week, 1,000 regulars
Digital Green: Early Results
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Apr-07
May-07
Jun-07
Jul-07
Aug-07
Sep-07
Oct-07
Nov-07
Dec-07
Jan-08
Feb-08
Mar-08
Apr-08
May-08
Jun-08
Cumulative
AdoptionRate(%)
Classic GREEN
Digital Green
System Cost (USD)
/Village/Year
Adoption (%)
/Village/Year
Cost/Adoption
(USD)
Training & Visit $840 11% $38.18
Digital Green $630 85% $3.70
At least 10 times more effective
per dollar spent than a Training & Visiting
system

6. Digital Green approach
• Mobilize farmers
• Identify local needs
• Technical inputs from experts
• Develop local content
and story boards
approved by subject
experts
• Train local community on
video production
• Videos feature local
practicing farmers
• Mediated dissemination
by local extension agent
• Data capture
• Feedback from farmers
Farmer Feedback
Adoptions
Adoption verifications
Technical knowledge and
expertise:
IRRI, CIMMYT, Local
Universities, Pvt sector and
experts

7. Use of ICT to amplify impact
Build on existing interventions and efforts and layer
technology solutions, thus amplifying the
effectiveness and efficiency
- Diverse partners – Government, Private sector, Research
institutions, NGOs
- Across different sectors and value chains
- In India as well as overseas – Africa, Afghanistan, Colombia
- 1 m families in India and over 300,000 in other countries

8. Capacity strengthening
Effectively transfer skills and strengthen capacities of
partners and community
- Created a cadre of over 3000 community extension
workers on use of ICT
- The community resource persons have produced
over 2800 practice videos in 22 different languages
and diverse domains (agriculture, livestock, poultry,
enterprise development, health, nutrition, agro-
forestry
- Community extension workers have conducted over
240,000 screenings resulting in over 400,000
adoptions
- Virtual Training Institute

9. Video Collection

10. Integrate tailored technology solutions
Great things are simple
……DG Partner, Andhra Pradesh

11. • Reality TV show, “Hara Hero,” in development with NDTV
• Vodafone audio message reinforcement of screened videos
• Doordarshan potential distribution of content on government broadcast channel
• YouTube channel (2,600 videos, 20 languages, 1 million views)
• Video/audio library accessible over mobile value added service
• Farm Radio International collaboration to align/reuse content, cross-promote radio/video
• Pico projectors increasingly available in-country
Integrated communications channels
• Timeline-based activities of each individual farmer
• Integrated with Google Maps for grading operations and layering other data sources
• Data/feedback to aggregate demand and target public and private sector products and services
• Ranking of farmers and extension agents on non-monetary-based incentive ladder
• Network analysis to identify and predict influencers that drive adoptions in a community
• Farmerbook, Wonder Village linked with Facebook for farmer-farmer, farmer-consumer sharing
Farmerbook
• Building video-based courseware a la Khan Academy
• Structured practice categorization (sector, topic, subject)
Videos library and Analytics dashboards
• Physical observation of non-negotiable components of adopted practices
• HTML5 and Java-based mobile apps for online/offline data management
Data management framework
Empowerment, Connections
Audio, Video, Mobile
Backend Platform
Institutional, Targeting
Technology

12. Analytics
analytics.digitalgreen.org

13. Farmerbook
farmerbook.digitalgreen.org

14. WHERE WE WORK
DG Offices DG Academic
Collaborations
DG Partners

15. Government collaboration:
National Rural Livelihoods
Mission, MORD, GOI
- Currently in six states and
expected outreach of about 1 m
farmers by 2015
- National Support Organization to
NRLM
- NGO partners implementing
value chain based interventions –
lac, cotton, paddy, soybean,
livestock and others
Private sector collaborations
- Syngenta Foundation, Vodafone,
IFC-JK Paper, BREL, Mahindra
Samridhi
Reach over 1 million farmers over 10000 villages
NGO and research institutions:
like PRADAN, BAIF, CSISA, ICRISAT

16. Digital Green in Africa:
 Reaching over 300,000 families
- Ministry of Agriculture, Ethiopia
- IDE, OXFAM America
- SASACAVA Africa
- Alliance for Green Revolution in
Africa
- World Cocoa Foundation
- Fayda Market
Sector and value chains:
- Health and nutrition
- Low cost irrigation devices
- Agriculture
- Cocoa
- Quality Protein Maize

17. Thoughts ?
Leverage existing networks of community Service Providers
to effectively disseminate and help farmers adopt the
technology and practices at scale
Agri-extension as a business model or embedded
services?
Farmer feedback for further iterations on inputs and
technology?
Collaborations to enable risk reduction at the farmer levels?
Integrate various feasible ICT solutions at CSP levels ?

18. Thank you
E-mail: navin@digitalgreen.org; +91 9953325457