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Mobile computing is a preferred technology for communicating timely information in a region where internet connectivity is poor. In India, about 8.93 crores of farm families are using mobiles. They either use a low-cost feature phone or smartphones. Considering this high-volume penetration of mobile technology among the farmers' community, the Government of India has launched a mobile application portal called mKisan.
* Two-way communication channel To provide a two communication channel based on mobile phones' Short Message Service (SMS). Through this service, government agencies can send advisories to farmers. Also, farmers can raise queries in their local languages.
* Pull SMS This service is meant for farmers and various stakeholders to extract details from databases by forwarding SMS. Two numbers, 51969 or 7738299899, are dedicated for this purpose.
* Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS): It is an automatic telephony system that communicates with callers, collects details, and routes call to the relevant recipient. An IVR application gives pre-recorded voice responses for appropriate situations. IVR applications do efficient work in handling a call.
* Push SMS Farmers can enrol themselves for receiving these SMS on their mobiles as per their particular needs and relevance at a specific point in time. They can register themselves for this service through any of these channels.
* Common Service Centers (CSCs)(Ksewa) The following are the list of some of the functions described under Ksewa:
* Commodity market price,
* Price alert,
* Agricultural information service
* Soil health card,
* Status messages for e-payment,
* Subsidy seed distribution, and
* Training information,
In addition to providing SMS-based and voice-based services, mobile computing is also used to provide other information services through mobile applications. The availability of low-cost smartphones with open-source Android operating systems has enabled the development of mobile applications. Such mobile applications act as a user interface to web services and portal describe in the previous section. Some of the mobile applications listed in Table \ref{agriapp} provide a price -alert, buy-selling of agricultural products, and crop insurance-related services. These mobile applications are typically used to collect data and provide crop-related information.
Despite the availability of many mobile applications, these applications find little utility among farmers because of their poor interface and not providing relevant information when needed the most. So there exist ample opportunities to use the full potential of mobile computing for the benefit of the farmer's community. For example, very few applications use the features such as location services, mapping services available on smartphones to develop practical applications for the agricultural sector.
Summary
Development engineers can devise appropriate mobile-computing based interventions to address the following problems.
* To fill the information gap through short message and voice-based services.
* To achieve two-way communications between farmers and agriculture services providers.
* To provide contextual information by using location services available in smartphones.
