In the ever-evolving sector of freshwater aquaculture, the need for precise, relevant, and accessible information has become increasingly vital for farmers, their institutions and government departments. Digitalization is being considered as the major component to achieving this target. Although digitalization has made great progress the communication between farmers and their organizations is still based on word-of-mouth, recalling memories, WhatsApp messages, phone calls, or sometimes sporadic member surveys. The "QR Code Based Monitoring System," addresses this communication challenge for areas with high smartphone accessibility. With the support of this tool, farmers and farmer institutions have an easy way to exchange information to provide technical support and to manage community-based institutions for aquaculture. The tool is operational in 25+ farmers institutions having around 200 to 300 farmer members each.
Traditionally, accurate and up-to-date information is the limiting factor for farmer institutions to estimate input needs and production, which then limits their ability to optimize services for their members. This hampers the growth of the sector and makes it difficult to make informed decisions, for the farmer as well as for the farmer institutions.
In India, farmer institutions confirmed several constraints while using modern smartphone-based apps such as often the target users for these apps are individual farmers and not institutions, barriers in customization options, free version limitations, business model of those apps such as recurring cost in paid version, data privacy, security and so on. The profit sense is often lost when considering customized digital solutions that attract huge investments, recurring costs, and other issues.
The “QR Code Based Farmer Monitoring System” tool attempts to respond to the above problem via open-source frameworks. By using the tool, communication between farmers and their institutions is improved to monitor fish growth, estimate production, and access curated benefits tailored to farmers’ needs by the farmer institution. In addition, the tool could also allow enrollment of members of the farmer institution to various government programs, improving access to financial services and insurance facilities.
Key words: Business planning, digitalization, digital tools, data-driven insights, real-time monitoring system, rural monitoring,