Knowledge Services, Innovations and Delivery

LifeLines India, an innovative yet simple-to-use phone based helpline is helping improve the lives of rural communities with access to technology and critical information, of much use in their daily lives.

Developed by OneWorld in collaboration with British Telecom and Cisco Systems, the LifeLines service is an endeavor to bridge the digital divide in rural India through ICT-mediated provision of information, guidance and advice –

• to farming communities as an agri-advisory service, and

• to teachers in rural schools as an academic support service

Users access the service through a telephone – either a mobile or landline phone - to put in their queries; these queries are responded to by relevant experts and the answers are made available to users within 24-48 hours. Users call back the helpline within this time; they input the query ID they received when they posted their query, and the system plays back the expert's response for them.

This easy-to-use interface is backed by complex communication technology and computing applications that enable management and processing of a large database of audio-textual queries and answers.

LifeLines Agriculture

LifeLines was first launched in the field of agriculture in September 2006 to cater to farmers’ information needs, starting with around 100 villages in 2 states. 

A farmer calls the LifeLines service

Presently the service reaches over 1.5 lakh farmer households in over 2100 villages across 3 states – Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

The service is facilitated on the ground through a network of field coordinators, who engage with farmers to help them access LifeLines and use the information they get from the service.

The information and know-how imparted through this helpline spans a wide range of topics on agriculture and allied activities like organic farming, integrated pest and nutrient management, farm inputs and best practices, Government schemes on loans, subsidies and insurance, as also region-specific market information.

The helpline receives an average of 400 – 450 queries daily. It also logs every answered query into a database of Frequently Asked Questions, which currently has crossed over 355,000 FAQs.

In the fourth year of its operation now, LifeLines has successfully set an example in the effective use of ICTs to address the issue of rural information gap and poverty. 

Farmers who have used LifeLines are today empowered with access to information which is otherwise not as easy to come by in rural India.

The gains in knowledge are reflected in the better field practices, and in the consequent improvement of farm productivity and incomes for farmers.

On a larger scale the economic benefits are helping to better life-standards - in education, health and general family welfare.

LifeLines Education

LifeLines Education took from the success of the service in the agriculture sector to bring about a similar information helpline for rural school teachers that would help to address the academic and pedagogical issues they faced in the classroom.

A teacher makes her call

This phone-based academic support service links up teachers from remote, rural schools with educational experts - to receive academic advisory, and pedagogical guidance on their daily classroom transactions. 

The service, introduced in 2008, is being implemented in the state of Rajasthan in partnership with UNICEF and the Government of Rajasthan. Here LifeLines Education is a toll-free helpline, accessible without charge by teachers across all the 33 districts in the state. The service covers a population of 455,518 teachers in 105,676 schools.

Teachers refer to LifeLines for a range of educational queries - whether related to their subjects, pedagogy, classroom management or child psychology. The service is also emerging as a popular source of reference for General Knowledge and career guidance information. 

The interest LifeLines Education has garnered in the academic community is reflected in its call volume, as also in the incisive nature of questions posted by teachers and students.

The FAQ database in LifeLines Education has near 25,000 knowledge elements today.

As a toll-free helpline, LifeLines Education is helping bring equitable access to quality academic support for teachers and students, especially in the remote-rural regions of Rajasthan.

Teachers have employed the new pedagogic techniques they learned from LifeLines in their classrooms and have found it enriching their classroom teaching and learning processes. Benefits of these enriched interactions are now passing on to their students in turn.

LifeLines thus affects a paradigm change in the way education support is sought, accessed and received via ICTs in rural India. Taking this to a broader level, the service is assisting the Government’s focus on capacity building of school teachers towards the aim of Universalisation of Elementary Education.

Going forward

OneWorld is now focused on forging new multi-stakeholder partnerships to explore and extend the potential of the LifeLines platform to further applications. Dialogues are in progress to take LifeLines to new domains and new locations and create sustainable rural e-services, not only in India but also beyond its borders.