mASK: A Functioning Personalized ICT-based Agriculture Advisory System Implementation, Impact and New Potential Jayalakshmi Umadikar, U. Sangeetha, M. Kalpana, M. Soundarapandian, Suma Prashant IITM’s Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) Chennai, India jaya@rtbi.in, sangeetha@rtbi.in, kalpana@rtbi.in, soundar@rtbi.in, suma@rtbi.in Ashok Jhunjhunwala Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) Chennai, India ashok@tenet.res.in Abstract: While Indian agriculture contributes merely 13.9% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, nearly 52% of the population still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. Close to half of the farmers are small farmers (owning 1.0 ha or less) facing near-stagnant productivity. This is due to several factors, but farmers often indicate that access to the right information at the right time is one of the most sought after need. Addressing this need to aid in the development of a productive and sustainable agricultural sector has certainly emerged as one of the major humanitarian challenges in India. There have been numerous efforts in this direction with the setting up of agricultural advisory systems, to provide information to farmers, but not many have succeeded in the objective of providing easily accessible, sustainable, personalized advisories to farmers. Recognizing this, the Indo- UK Advanced Technology Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, Systems and Services (IUATC), a major technology transfer initiative, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in India and UK Government under the Digital Economy Theme is attempting to address the challenges in Indian agriculture through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) networks. This paper presents a functioning Agricultural Advisory System that has been built with the aim of bridging information gaps between farmers and agriculture knowledge workers (such as agricultural scientists and extension workers) and is an extension of a technology effort that has been previously presented. While our earlier work only discussed the potential of using an innovative ICT approach to providing personalized agricultural advisories, this paper covers details of the technology implementation, presents a brief summary of the impact analysis carried out with the farmers registered into our system and discusses new features that could make the system more effective. Index Terms—Agricultural Technology, Mobile telephony applications, Agriculture Advisory System, Call Centre, Dashboard for farmers, Interactive Voice Response System I. INTRODUCTION The State of Agriculture report has noted that the contribution of Indian agriculture to the overall GDP of the country has come down to 13.9% [1] and yet a large section of the Indian population –close to 52% - depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. Majority of Indian farmers are small or marginal farmers who own 1 ha or less and face challenges such as small landholdings, decreasing yield, decreasing profitability, uncertainty of water availability, vulnerability to world commodity prices and many more. On the other hand, with urbanization and income growth, consumption patterns have shifted from cereals to non-cereal food (pulses, edible oils, fruits, vegetables, dairy and other livestock, fisheries).Supply of these commodities do not match up to the demand and not surprisingly, food inflation has increased in recent years. Farmers should have been able to take advantage of this demand and increase their profitability but lack of timely information at many levels has prevented them from doing so. Many farmers can be better-equipped to handle these challenges if they are provided the right information at the right time, personalized to meet their specific needs [2]. However, with around 88 million farmers in India, with 98.5 million holdings (operating an average area of 1.1 hectare) [3], the problem of how to provide personalized advisories to each might seem to have no solution. The ICT revolution in the country heralded by the mobile telephony boom brought with it an opportunity to look at the problem afresh. India currently has 900 million wireless subscribers with over 350 million from the rural areas [4]. Villages are well-connected, with 2G GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) networks offering good voice connectivity. More importantly, nearly every farmer or a farming family is able to afford a mobile handset and is comfortable with