As a first step towards enabling the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in agriculture, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research is developing national level agricultural knowledge management portals.  The flagship initiative for this is development of an exclusive portal on rice viz., Rice Knowledge Management Portal.

RKMP will serve as an information highway for sharing rice knowledge through latest ICT tools including mobile telephony. It will also help agricultural departments’ ongoing activities in reaching out to the farmers through extension advisory services, in most effective way.

What makes it Special?

The RKMP has several global firsts in terms of comprehensiveness and utility. Built on web 2.0 standards, this portal caters to location specific information needs of many stakeholders through IP based customization on 24X7 bases.  Another striking feature of this portal is providing content in local language.

Services Provided by the Portal

  The Extension and Farmers domains provide production know how, package of practices, FAQs etc., in English and local languages.  In research domain, various services are provided such as AICRIP Intranet, archives of AICRIP data (27000 datasets!), communities of practice (CoP), bio-informatics suite, approach papers, India Rice Research Repository (i3R), status papers on rice for different states etc.

The portal operates two e-learning platforms providing learning opportunity to scientists and extension workers at their time and space. This portal also caters to information needs of exporters and farmers through the trade information system.  Another feature of the portal is the indexing of mandi prices of paddy from regulated market yards (from Agmarknet). Policy makers can directly access area, production, productivity trends of last four decades up to district level.