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This paper describes the experiences gained in terms of challenges encountered and lessons learned in an exploratory initiative of mobile phone‐based multimedia agricultural advisory System (MAAS), which helps in providing timely agricultural expert advice to farmers on their mobile phone. When a farmer is calling, a call‐centre‐like interface containing personalized information of that farmer pops up at the expert's end. The expert views the farmer's dashboard and analyses the situation and query based advisory is provided to the farmer. This agricultural advisory system formed part of a research study under National Agricultural Innovation Projects (NAIP), New Delhi. The MAAS is developed by Indian Institute of Technology Madras's Rural Technology and Business Incubator and it was field tested with 1200 farmers in three districts of Tamil Nadu (Kancheepuram, Erode and Dharmapuri), India, during December 2010 to June 2012. The aim of this paper is to describe the experiences, highlighting a number of specific challenges and lessons associated with providing mobile based agricultural advisories to farmers in rural areas.

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.

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