手机是如何改变印度农业的

jays

于2010-08-18 14:48:06翻译 | 已有428人浏览

手机在农民的手中能够发挥多大的作用？你完全想不到。

For decades Santosh Ostwal obsessed over an obscure problem: how to make it easier for Indian farmers to water their crops.

Santosh Ostwal 这十几年来都为一个费解的难题而困扰：如何让印度的农民更方便地灌溉作物。

As a kid in 1981, Ostwal would watch his one-legged grandfather make the one-mile trek out to his fields to irrigate his land. It was arduous and repetitive; access to electricity and water was sporadic. Now an engineer, Ostwal has finally solved his grandfather's problem with a phone-controlled water pump-starter called the Nano Ganesh. It's an elegant example of how mobile phones are being used in the developing world in incredibly innovative ways.

在 1981 年，还是个孩子的 Ostwal 就看着他只有一条腿的祖父徒步 1 里到他的农田里灌溉。这样的工作既辛苦又重复，而又很难接上电力或自来水。现在已是工程师的 Ostwal 终于靠着一款叫做 Nano Ganesh 的手机遥控水泵启动器解决了他祖父的难题。这是一个很好的例子，展示了移动电话如何通过极富创意的方式应用于发展中国家。

Here's how the Nano Ganesh works. A farmer purchases the device for between $12 and $268, depending on the model. The device is then connected both to a mobile phone and the electric water pump. Once it's set up, the farmer just needs to call that phone and enter a code to get it going. No cell service? No problem. Ostwal also made a remote control. He claims the water, electricity and time savings can cover the cost of the device in 11 days. But creating the device was far from easy, Ostwal told The Economist recently:

Nano Ganesh 的工作原理是这样的：按照设备型号不同，农民可以以 12 美元至 268 美元的价格买到一套设备。然后将这一设备连接到一台移动电话和一台电子水泵上。连接好了以后，农民只要打个电话，输入密码就能让水泵工作了。那如果当地没有手机讯号怎么办？没关系。Ostwal 还发明了个遥控器。他宣称设备的花费可以在 11 天内从节约的水、电与时间上弥补回来。但发明这样一套设备可不简单，Ostwal 最近在接受《经济人》（Economist）采访时说：

My wife is an electronics engineer. She used to assemble all the things in our bedroom.  I used to play the things all over the day on the farm. She used to work during night. I used to come home at midnight or 2 or even 3 o'clock. She would ask me, 'Tomorrow morning which tool do you want to take away with you?' In my sleep, I would hand over some modifications to her and tell her to make that prototype in time for my early morning visit at 6. And my wife did it at 3 o' clock in the morning with two kids beside her - one is of 3 years and the other of one year.

我的妻子是一位电子工程师。当时，她把所有的东西都堆在我们的卧室里，我则整天在农场里鼓捣这些玩意儿。她在晚上工作，我则时常到了半夜或者 2 点甚至 3 点才回家。她会问我：“明天早上你想带哪样工具出门？”在我上床之前，我会把一些修改工作交给她做，并告诉她在明天早上 6 点按时完成样品。然后我的妻子就会从早上 3 点开始做，身边还伴着两个孩子——一个 3 岁，另一个才 1 岁。

In 2009, the invention won the top prize in a global mobile innovation contest run by Nokia.

这一发明于 2009 年赢得了由诺基亚（Nokia）举办的全球移动创新竞赛的头奖。

But Ostwal isn't the only one using mobile phones in innovative ways. Earlier this year, an Indian economic policy think tank released what the Indian daily business newspaper The Economic Times called "the first ever paper" to explore the impact of mobile information services on farming.

不过 Ostwal 可不是唯一一个创造性地使用移动电话的人。在今年年初时，一个印度经济政策智囊团发表了被印度的商业日报《经济时报》（The Economic Times）称为探索移动信息服务在农业领域作用的“头号文件”。

The authors of the 53-page study (pdf) interviewed farmers and fishermen in mostly rural parts of India. (Of the 187 farmers interviewed, every last one had a mobile phone.) While the authors found that the full potential of mobile phones has yet to be realized, they included some examples of how the information services are already saving -- and making -- farmers relatively huge amounts of money.

这一 53 页的报告（pdf 格式）的作者们采访了印度农村的农民和渔民。（在受采访的 187 位农民中，每一个都有移动电话。）虽然他们认为移动电话的潜力还没有完全为人所知，但他们已经列举出一些信息服务已经为农民节省——以至于创造——相对而言大量的金钱的例子。

Jagadeesh, a 40-year-old farmer with a middle school level education, shares a 9-acre farm with his two brothers in a village in the state of Rajasthan. One information service, the IKSL, helped save him from losing half his crop:

Jagadeesh 这位 40 岁的受过中等教育的农民在 Rajasthan 的一个村子里与他的两个兄弟共享一片 9 英亩的农田。一个叫 IKSL 的信息服务帮助他避免了损失半数作物的风险。

This farmer acted on timely weather information received through IKSL to protect a harvested crop (Gwar - used as livestock fodder) that was lying on the ground exposed to the rains. He estimates that, but for this ability to act, he would have lost 50 per cent of this crop, resulting in a loss of between Rs.5,000 and Rs.6,000 [$107 to $128].

他参照通过 IKSL 收到的定时天气信息来避免了待收获的作物（Gwar——用作牲畜饲料）倒在地上而受到大雨的冲刷。他估计，仅仅是这一次，他就可能会损失 50% 的作物，造成 5000 至 6000 卢比（107 至 128 美元）的经济损失。

He also increased his annual earnings by 25 percent -- $535 -- thanks to the farming and disease control techniques he learned from the service's regular messages.

他的年收入也提高了 25%——535 美元——多亏了他从该服务平时的信息里学到的种植与疾病控制技术。

And there are new promising programs, too. Tata, the definition of a multinational conglomerate, has begun testing a service that allows farmers to send photos of diseased crops to experts directly from their phones. Another company, ITC Limited, set up "Tradersnet," a virtual commodity exchange that connects producers and wholesale purchasers of coffee:

还有不少有前途的项目。Tata 这一跨国联合公司已经开始测试一项服务，让农民直接用他们的手机将得病作物的照片发送给专家。而 ITC 有限公司建立了“交易者网络（Tradersnet）”，这是一个虚拟的货物交易平台，将咖啡生产商和批发商联系起来。

SMS messages are sent to users' mobile phones every morning with the offers and grades available for purchase on that day. At the end of the day, users receive a text message with details of what actually took place.

每天早上用户的移动电话都会收到短信息，告诉他们当天可以购买的货品及其品级。在一天结束以后，用户还会收到一天内达成的交易的信息。

And, unlike other kinds of tech, the advantages of mobile phones in agriculture aren't limited to the wealthy. As the study's author's conclude: "[E]ven in the case of poor farmers facing significant constraints, we found that there were still opportunities to realise productivity gains from the adoption of new farming practices and actions to mitigate crop losses."

而且，与其他类型的技术不同，在农业中利用移动电话并不仅仅是增加财富而已。正如这项研究的作者总结的那样：“我们发现即使是那些受到很大限制的贫困农民，他们仍有很大的机会采用新的种植与保护作物的方法来实现产量的提高。”