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Warana Unwired: Connecting Farmers in India to Vital Information

From Shareideas

Credit: Microsoft Research India

Through its Warana Unwired project, researchers at the Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group at Microsoft Research India (MSR India) worked with a 70,000-person rural sugarcane cooperative to run an experiment replacing an existing PC based system with a cheaper SMS enabled mobile phone based system. The new mobile system replicates almost all of the PC based functionality, and is cheaper, adds additional functionality, and is more popular.

1 Story
2 How it was done
3 Technology used
4 External links

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Story

The Warana sugarcane cooperative is located in the Indian state of Maharashtra with an operating area of 75 villages. The cooperative’s primary job is to crush sugarcane and to produce sugar.

Through its “Warana Unwired” project, the researchers working at the TEM group at MSR India sought to provide farmers information in a cost effective way. Farmers are now able to use mobile phones to access data ranging from tracking sugarcane output each farmers produce to getting their pay stubs. Since the project was initiated in November of 2006, thousands of farmers have used the system, and have processed over 10,000 text messages.

Warana Unwired is the next stage in a government of India’s effort that began in 1998 to help farmers’ share and access valuable information via computers. Through the “Warana Wired Village” project, more than 50 computer-equipped kiosks were set up to connect 40,000 farmers living in various villages. Though the original goals of the project were not met, the computer kiosks have been used by the farmers to check their sugarcane output, track fertilizer use, issue harvesting permits, and obtain pay stubs. However, the project ran into obstacles due to the high maintenance costs of the PCs operating in rugged rural conditions and lack of power.

To address these challenges, researchers at the TEM group at MSR India began replacing the PCs with SMS enabled phones. As a result, farmers now have access to information 24 hours a day from any location, including the fields where they work. The advantages of the new SMS system are many: it’s faster, has additional functionality, is easier to use, and cheaper. Should the cooperative switch completely from the PCs to mobile phones, it could save up to a million rupees (US$22,000) through avoiding the cost of maintaining the computers.

The Warana cooperative is exploring scaling the project to all of the 75 villages where members operate.

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How it was done

The client PCs were replaced with cheap SMS enabled phones. A Microsoft Smart Phone was attached to the server through a USB to create an SMS gateway that converts incoming SMS messages to query the database in the PC server. The response was also converted to an SMS message, with the result sent back to the phone that sent the orginal message. In most cases, farmers use the kiosk operator (who is now the phone operator) as the intermediary to send the SMS messages.

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