courtesy TCS
For the last few years Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the IT consulting division of India’s mammoth Tata Group, has been developing a set of interconnecting technologies to help India’s rural farmers, all under the banner of mKRISHI (the ‘m’ is for mobile while “krishi” means farming in many Indian languages).
The mKRISHI system is a network of in-field weather sensors, back-office agricultural experts, data and software that all work in tandem with the farmers’ mobile phones via a custom mobile app. If the phone is not sophisticated enough to support the app (which can happen quite easily in India) or if the farmer is illiterate, the farmers can also connect to the service via voice SMS. If the farmer has a camera phone, they can send pictures to mKRISHI as well.
The farmers are able to ask any number of questions from market prices to which pesticide is best to use for a certain crop and pest. The backend is unique in its sophistication, staffed by agricultural experts armed with a library of agricultural knowledge, and connected with technology that allows the experts to detect the farmer’s location and pull up detailed information on that area such as weather, soil conditions, nearby market prices, and other information of high value to farmers, for between $1 and $2 a month.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that TCS is working to expand mKRISHI’s technology, both geographically (Ghana and the Philippines have expressed interest and invited TCS to demonstrate mKRISHI in their respective local languages) and by leveraging mKRISHI it as a platform on which TCS can “generate thousands of micro-enterprises in villages.”
What we think:
As we’ve said before, Indian companies’ expertise developed in serving their own domestic market and its inherent challenges—low literacy, unreliable infrastructure, and poor customers—has prepared them to be world leaders in serving the needs of the hundreds of millions (if not billions) of underserved in the world’s developing countries, and TCS’s global expansion of mKRISHI is the latest example of this.
When contrasted with last week’s news of Tata’s reducing its share in its own mobile telecom business to a minority stake, it suggests that Tata is finding better ways to make money and make a difference in rural India than owning the network. As mobile carriers continue their inexorable slide towards becoming dumb pipes, they would be wise to follow TCS’s suit in investing in serious utility VAS solutions.
