Conservation Agriculture, Successful Mobile data service

1. The four-day World Congress on Conservation Agriculture (CA), beginning at New Delhi from February 4, will draw up a road map and strategies to promote CA.

Excerpts from the report:

"Presently over two million hectares area in the Indo-Gangetic plain and about two lakh hectares in Andhra Pradesh is under resource conservation technologies, and this is likely to go up at least four-five times in the next five years."

"Farmers who adopted conservation technologies are saving water and energy costs, attaining higher yields and getting more returns. Large-scale trials and farmers experiences show that the available technologies can be adopted in wide range of rainfed and irrigated environments."

2. Thomson Reuters announced that its ground-breaking mobile information service for India's agricultural community Reuters Market Light (RML) has sold over 100,000 three- month subscriptions since its launch just over a year ago.

Reuters Market Light, a pioneer in this field, provides customised and localised market intelligence to farmers in their local language including crop prices from local markets, local weather forecasts, and relevant agricultural news and crop advisory information. RML has built an end-to-end value chain from sourcing through to rural distribution to meet the decision-critical needs of the farming sector over mobile phones. It currently covers over 50 commodities and over 250 markets in the two states.

Mobile handsets, Food Processing

1. Cellphone makers are betting on Rural India to revive the mobile phone sales which has started dwindling in top tier cities. Likes of Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Spice are working on different business plans for these markets. This includes a separate distribution model, tying up with microfinance companies to offer handsets at easy instalments and launch handsets customised for the rural consumer. More details here.

The idea that I like the most is from Spice Mobile about "shared handsets". Shared handsets will allow many people to use the same phone with separate connections and hence reduce their cost of ownership.

2. Joint Secretary Ministry of Food and Processing India (MFPI) Ajit Kumar saidlack of food processing facility is resulting in annual loss of over Rs 48,000 crore of perishable and non-perishable commodities in the country. "We process only six per cent of the produce against an average processing of around 50-60 per cent in developed economies," He said.

Nokia Life Tools

Nokia has launched a service, dubbed "Life Tools" to provide the latest agricultural information, such as weather updates and grain prices; educational tools, such as English-language training and general knowledge; and appealing entertainment--namely horoscopes and downloadable ringtones.

Monthly subscription prices have been pegged at between Rs 30 and Rs 60 (62 cents to $1.23) for the agriculture and education modules. Entertainment services are paid for as downloads. Nokia hopes the platform will fill a big gap in 3G-starved markets like India where consumers are unlikely to have the flat-fee data bundles or fast download speeds that developed-market phone users have become used to.