Date:18/01/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/01/18/stories/2008011851110300.htm

Tamil Nadu

Now a one-stop shop for farmers’ needs

Karthik Madhavan

An engineering college has set up a portal on agri-related activities

The website contains information about best agriculture practices
The construction of the website took about a year-and-half

Fruit of their efforts: The website developed by Kongu Engineering College is expected to go a long way in helping farmers at the touch of a button

PERUNDURAI: http://wserver1.tn.nic.in/apic/apic is where farmers’ search for information may end.

It may also be the place where their fortunes may turn around. Offering the facilities is a website.

Developed by the Information Technology Department of the Kongu Engineering College, the portal serves as a one stop shop for farmers’ needs.

“The website contains information about best agriculture practices, plant protection, fertiliser use, irrigation methods, besides including details about allied agriculture activity like animal husbandry,” says S. Karmegam, head of the department of electronics and instrumentation.

He is the one who coordinated the efforts in setting up the portal.

Contents

With contents in Tamil, the website also has market prices of various commodities and land use and soil details for five villages in Perundurai Taluk, details of organic farming practices and weather.

Mr. Karmegam says the college has sourced information from 19 different organisations for putting up the website, the construction of which took about a year-and-half.

Advantage

Apart from having its contents in Tamil, the website has the advantage of opening in any computer as the Tamil fonts are in Unicode. It is built using open source software.

There is more to the website.

Chat room

It has a chat room, Arattai, a platform for farmers’ discussions and Mandram, a forum where farmers can get their doubts cleared by experts.

Farmer-friendly

Inaugurating the website, Collector T. Udhayachandran urged the college to make it more farmer-friendly by integrating voice-based services. He said the district administration was working towards installing electronic display boards on commodities prices for farmers’ benefit.

College Correspondent V. R. Sivasubramanian said it was part of the college’s efforts to reach out to the public.

“Being in a rural area, we thought it would be best to start with farmers.” Principal Natarajan said the institution would come up with more such products.