In the context of rural India, planning is mainly prescriptive (through mandated schemes) and top-down (by extension community from the line departments). Realizing this planning setup and the increasing demand for Geographical-Information & Communication Technology (Geo-ICT) applications in the rural systems in India, a prototype distributed collaboration tool, called GramyaVikas, meaning rural development, has been developed to assist the rural extension community in their own existing decision-making process more interactively and in an integrated/coordinated manner. GramyaVikas, evolved out of the needs assessment of the user community, is a secure and cost-effective system developed for defined users with open source (a) content management system and (b) Geographical Information Systems. The Web-GIS module which is a part of the database query module is developed using UMN MapServer with p.mapper (as interface for MapServer) and PostgreSQL (as RDBMS) as its backend. All these modules are packed under one content management system which takes care of the data transaction that takes place in the system. This web-based tool will help the users to share/retrieve data/information; communicate for taking mutual decisions; make useful queries on spatial/nonspatial database to identify candidate villages/entities; and generate various views/scenarios for different rural development schemes. Presently, this Geo-ICT tool is being developed in an intranet environment. The resulting system is intended to assist the remote users in analyzing rural-informatics for rural development planning decisions online, with customized GIS tools to suit the requirements of a few line departments for decision-making
(Gramya-vikas.pdf).
In sequel to the distributed collaboration model GramyaVikas and to make it more robust and near real time system/tool, the sensor network module will be added for the decision makers. This will enable the users to obtain near real time data through (field servers) placed in different micro-agroclimatic regions in a typical semi-arid watershed. This will enhance the decision making process by the user community in the districts/sub-districts, who represents the local farmers and take into consideration of the local conditions/problems.
The web interface with field servers in the rural systems has more advantages over the traditional systems: centralized control over data and model (i.e. lower cost of SW and HW, maintenance, training, etc.), global and easy accessibility, interconnectivity, model propagation, education platform, and more importantly interconnectivity/ coordination/ flexibility in decision making/participatory decision making (Geo-ICT advantages); and high density monitoring, robustness, cost-effectiveness and easy maintenance (sensor network advantages). Different and dynamic parameters like soil moisture, weather conditions, crop growth/health, etc. can be obtained from the sensors and passed on to the local farmers in regional languages for their use. This will allow the farmers to relate the obtained data to the ground reality and take necessary actions for their respective fields.
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