The Last Mile - Bringing agricultural information to mobile phones in a small village in West Bengal

The best solution turned out to be a mobile friendly web page, rather than an app. While 4G networks are rapidly arriving even in remote areas of India, load times are still an issue. To ensure that the farmers accessing the information would not perceive the product as being "broken" or not working, we favored a very simple web page laid out to work well on a phone.

I am often asked about the scalability of this project. It was never meant to scale or to be a money making venture. However, the lessons could certainly be applied to other villages and use cases. Those who work to bring services to the "last mile" understand that in many cases we are focusing on a small audience. Agricultural applications and web pages are certainly available in India, but only in Hindi or Bengali languages. This project could be replicated for other farming villages in India or other countries for groups not speaking the dominant languages.

Check out the project on your mobile phone at http://www.hamiltonganjkisan.com