How a Simple SIM Card Makes Farmers More Efficient

India's GreenSIM initiative exposes rural farmers to tech and essential real-time info.

A handful of years ago, Chandrakala Kongala, a farmer in the rural village of Kommireddipalli in the southern Indian state of Telangana, faced a devastating problem. In one fell swoop, an unanticipated downpour had ravaged her peanut crop.

Farming wasn’t a leisurely pursuit for Kongala; it was her livelihood. Living in a remote area with limited access to transportation, she was ineligible to enter the mainstream job market. If the crops failed, she’d be left with no source of income.

During the following growing seasons, Kongala was flourishing. She was cultivating a variety of crops, at times harvesting earlier than anticipated. Eventually, she came to own a one-acre farm yielding hundreds of pounds of crops per harvest (her rice yield, for example, has jumped from 120 to 165 pounds). By spring of this year, she was earning 20,000 to 30,000 rupees per season ($300 to $450)—a lavish sum in a community of farmers subsisting on one to two dollars a day.

What changed? The weather may have been more temperate, but the most important factor had nothing to do with the land or the climate. Instead, it was a device familiar to much of the developed world: the SIM card.

Introducing the GreenSIM

The idea started in 2002, when the Telangana government recruited the nonprofit International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) to train farmers in drought-susceptible regions to develop preemptive agrarian practices. As ICRISAT began to seek local collaborators to put the effort in motion, a self-help collective of female farmers known as Adarsha Mahila Samakhya (AMS) came forward.

Researchers from ICRISAT soon visited villages in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, surveying farmers from AMS to gain insight into their methods and challenges. In each state, the institute started by establishing a “Village Knowledge Center,” a kiosk at which these farmers—most of whom had had no prior exposure to electronics due to prohibitive costs and location—could learn how to operate mobile devices and computers and extract agricultural information from static websites.

Things would not progress this easily, however. While the participants were eager to familiarize themselves with new technology, the text of the websites was entirely in English, a language foreign to them. What's more, like the majority of Indian farmers, many of these women were illiterate, leaving them unable read the text in any language.

“Literacy levels of farmers are low in India,” V. V. Sumanth Kumar, a scientist at ICRISAT, told Ars. “So we decided to target mobile devices. And instead of SMS [which would require farmers to read], we thought of going with voice messages.”

Enter the GreenSIM. Designed to optimize agricultural prosperity in developing countries, the device leverages the core functions of a SIM card (transmitting calls and texts) to deliver free voice messages to farmers, offering updates relating to growing and selling crops.

To animate the product, ICRISAT equipped a group of about 7,000 farmers with GreenSIM-activated cell phones and began to draft text messages discussing weather, soil fertility, pest problems, and crop pricing based on reports from the Indian Meteorological Department and data collected in villages throughout Telangana. The messages, sent five times a day as outgoing calls, cover the gamut—from weather forecasts to agricultural advice (crop rotation, fertilizer-blend recommendations, adaptation to climate change) to crop-pricing and market activity alerts.

Impact on farmers

Based on its initial field work with the agrarian community in India, ICRISAT made further tweaks. The organization determined that farmers would respond most keenly to these alerts if they heard them from other farmers. The GreenSIM setup now dictates that message text is verbally translated to the local languages of farmers, who record and e-mail the files to ICRISAT.

“Agriculture is really an industry that’s based on trust. If I was to give you a seed, you’d have to trust me that it had these certain characteristics, that, based on my own experience, I’m telling you what it’ll be like when you grow it in your field,” ICRISAT General Director David Bergvinson told Ars. “It’s the same as getting information associated with agriculture. Farmers tend to trust other farmers more than they do extension agents, agri-dealers, or scientists.”

The approach has shown potential. Vimalamma Jawadi, a farmer from the Telangana village of Janampet, said her profits have increased from 5,000 to 20,000 rupees ($80 to $310) since she began to use the GreenSIM in 2012. Previously, she had raised only one crop. After GreenSIM messages alerted her to the benefits of crop rotation, however, she incorporated rice, corn, millet, and peanuts into her three-acre plot, increasing her chances of a successful harvest.

Kumar spoke of another farmer named Madhava Rao, who lived in the village of Moosapet, about nine miles from Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana. After a reasonably fertile season (barring natural assaults like hail storms or pest invasions), he would earn 70,000 rupees ($1,080) per acre. While his yield was strong, he was selling his crops to markets through a buyer, unaware that selling directly to the consumer could be far more lucrative. In this case, GreenSIM helped maximize Rao’s business strategy as much as his farming one.

“When we compare what he was charging for pomegranate with the prices in the city of Hyderabad, his prices are much less. We asked him to go to a gated community in Hyderabad, where he could sell directly to the consumers,” Kumar said. “Every Sunday, in the gated community, from 10am to 2pm, he would sell pomegranate at a lower price. The price in the market is anything between 120 rupees to 180 rupees ($1.85 to $2.75) per case. He was selling at 100 to 140 rupees ($1.55 to $2.15) per case. Because of these interventions—by connecting directly with the consumers—his income doubled. He now gets around 140,000 rupees ($2,155) per acre.”

The “Green” ecosystem expands

Inspired by the success of the GreenSIM, ICRISAT has since developed a more robust piece of hardware: the GreenPhablet, a thick, GreenSIM-equipped phone-tablet hybrid intended to be a mobile equivalent of the Village Knowledge Center.

“GreenPhablet was designed really around rigor,” Bergvinson said. “It could be dropped, it could be put in water, and so forth. And it could be read in full light, where if you bring a normal tablet out into the sunlight, it can be very hard to see the screen. It was really designed around farmers’ conditions.”

Currently, farmers access the GreenPhablet through extension workers (GreenPhablets require an Internet connection—which most farmers don’t have—to sync data.) These extension workers collect information on participating farmers’ land and practices, using the GreenPhablet to invoke an ICRISAT database and pull targeted recommendations for the individual farmer. They also use the device to facilitate communication among farmers; an initiative to supplement calls with real-time video conversations is in progress.

“This technology enables you to communicate with another farmer across the country from you, or even in a different country in some cases,” said Bergvinson. “One of our partners is... using participatory video whereby farmers are communicating through video their best practices. That video is then taken to other communities and shown through portable projectors and low-cost digital technology. They’re also using the Internet now.”

A broader problem

Kumar noted that GreenSIM-powered hardware and software have engendered “excitement among the farmers’ community”—a much-needed counter to the despair many farmers experience when the vagaries of nature annihilate their crops and profits.

Indeed, the rural agrarian lifestyle in India has proven harrowing. In addition to the threats of anemic yields and profits, state governments—particularly that in Telangana—provide insufficient financing, research, and standardization of agricultural practices, leaving farmers unsupported and uninformed. Desperate, farmers often lose money to schemes in which fake or expensive seeds are marketed as rare hybrids or throw themselves at the mercy of private lenders, placing themselves in even more dire straits.

“What generally happens is a farmer takes loans from local money lenders, with high interest. He puts all of the money into raising the crop. If the crop fails, he needs to pay back his debt,” Kumar explained. “In the next season, if the same thing happens, there’s a lot of money he needs to pay to the money lenders, and the interest grows over a period of time. It’s a vicious cycle."

So vicious, in fact, that among the country’s rural population, for whom agriculture is the chief source of income, it has forced hordes of farmers into suicide. According to a 2012 report from the National Crime Reports Bureau, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka—states with high populations of rural farmers—were collectively responsible for 32 percent of suicides in India. Farming and agriculture is listed as the fifth-most common profession for Indian suicide victims overall, and this line of work has the fourth-highest suicide rate of all professions recorded. In the study, ingestion of insecticides was noted as the sixth-most common method, and in the three states mentioned above, it was responsible for 30 to 43 percent of suicides in 2012.

Looking ahead

As the stories of Jawadi and Rao show, the future may be rosier. Perhaps no story illustrates this better, however, than that of the aforementioned Kongala. A high-school dropout, she was thrust into an abusive marriage. After the birth of their two children, her husband left the family, forcing Kongala to reconcile her stunted professional credentials with her new responsibility as sole provider. With meager financial opportunities available, she turned to farming, only to discover through recurring failed harvests how vulnerable her half-acre plot was in her drought-prone village.

Tides began to turn when Kongala joined AMS. After the organization linked with ICRISAT, she visited the Village Knowledge Centers, where she developed bookkeeping skills and learned to operate computers and software programs like Microsoft Office and Outlook. Soon, she was managing a computer lab, delivering voice messages to farmers, and participating in video conferences—experience she would parlay into her current job as a computer operator for a seed company in Hyderabad.

In hopes that other farmers will follow Kongala’s lead, ICRISAT is collaborating with other nonprofits to bring services to developing countries in Asia and Africa, which have appropriated technology like GreenSeeker and eWallet to target smallholder farmers. The organization continues to seek partnerships to address the realms of finance, health, and education.

“When you look at a rural family, while agriculture is the principal source of income, they have many other decisions to make within the household,” Bergvinson said. “It’s not just around the production of food. All of these services need to be offered.”

Though ICRISAT has made strides, the plights of impoverished farmers still far outweigh the efforts of a handful of NGOs. Only when adequate, cohesive governmental support extricates these farmers from the abyss of debt and suicide will significant portions of them truly have a chance to flourish. In the meantime, however, the technology and training from nonprofits like ICRISAT will continue to serve as a testament to rural farmers’ ability to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing global workforce.

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Taxonomy

• Crop Farming
• Sustainable Agriculture
• Soil Management
• Agricultural Technology
• Crops