Akanksha Barot · How I can help · Government and public programmes
Government and public programmes
Extension delivery at population scale, designed around the procurement route rather than despite it.
Public agricultural programmes have a reach no private platform can buy and a delivery problem no private platform has to solve. The extension officer ratio is the binding constraint, the languages are not optional, and the procurement route often decides the architecture before anyone has written a requirement. I have built the advisory and field coordination layer at national scale in the private sector, which is the same product problem under different rules.
Who this is for
Whether this page is about you.
- State and national agriculture departments running extension services.
- Public programme teams delivering advisory, subsidy or procurement schemes to farmers.
- Public sector units and mission bodies commissioning farmer-facing digital systems.
What usually goes wrong
Three problems I keep meeting.
- 01
The extension officer ratio is the real product constraint
One officer to several thousand farmers is a coordination problem before it is an information problem. Visit planning and sequencing does more per rupee than anything else in the system, and it is usually the last thing commissioned. At Jiva it carried most of a roughly 30 percent productivity gain.
- 02
Multilingual is scoped as translation and priced as translation
Several languages and several scripts, with crop names and agronomy shifting by district, is a content and data model problem that runs for the life of the system. Budgeting it as a one-off localisation line is how programmes end up with four languages that are correct and eleven that are not.
- 03
Reporting is upward and the field gets nothing back
When the system exists to produce a state-level dashboard, the officer entering the data receives no benefit from entering it accurately. Data quality then degrades in a way no amount of monitoring fixes. The design answer is to give the field something useful first.
What backs it
Every claim names where it came from.
AgriCentral reached more than ten million downloads across Indian states, with simple UX for low-tech farmers across diverse languages and geographies. Recognised by Google among the "Best Apps from India for India".
Olam Information Services (Mindsprint), Head of Product, 2018 to 2021A visit planning and field coordination product improved field staff productivity by roughly 30 percent. The same shape of problem as extension officer coverage.
Jiva AgServices, IndonesiaCo-branded farmer services with Vodafone and Idea, ICICI Bank’s rural mobile app, and TAFE’s farmer base through JFarm. Institutional partners with their own approval chains and their own brand risk.
RML AgTech (FarmBee), AVP Enterprise Relationships, 2016 to 2018Relevant here
The product streams this segment usually needs.
- Farmer advisory
Agronomy guidance a farmer acts on the same week, in the language and at the reading level they actually have. In AgriCentral that meant seven languages, activity schedules built from the crop and the sowing date, and a question channel answered by agronomists and by other farmers.
Source: AgriCentral, Head of Product 2018–2021, launched 31 December 2018. Jiva, Product Lead 2021–2025. - Weather forecast communication
The forecast is a commodity. Turning it into an instruction someone trusts enough to change a spray date is the product.
Source: A fifteen day outlook inside AgriCentral, and the forecast panel on the Jiva advisory screen. - Pest and disease advisory
Identification, threshold and treatment, with a false-positive cost measured in a farmer’s money.
Source: Crop Care in AgriCentral: image-based pest and disease detection, shipped while I was Head of Product. - Field agent management
Visit planning, sequencing, coordination and what each agent is accountable for by the end of the day.
Source: Jiva field coordination product, Indonesia. Roughly 30 percent field staff productivity gain. - Leadership reporting
The internal view leadership actually steers on, rather than the deck assembled the night before the board call.
Source: Internal operations tooling at AgriCentral and Jiva. - Crop and produce procurement
Harvest purchase: quality capture, price agreement, weighment, and payment that lands when it was promised.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform.
How it runs
What working together looks like.
- 01
Service design before specification
What the officer does on a Tuesday, what the farmer receives, and what evidence the programme needs, written down before a tender document fixes it.
- 02
Specification and vendor oversight
Writing requirements that describe outcomes and field conditions rather than screens, and reviewing what the vendor delivers against them.
- 03
Rollout and measurement
Phased district rollout with a defined measure of whether it worked, and the authority to stop something that did not.
Questions
Asked before, answered straight.
Have you delivered a government programme directly?
No, and that is worth saying plainly. My work has been private sector, including institutional partners such as ICICI Bank, Vodafone, Idea and TAFE, who bring their own approval chains. The product problems of extension delivery are ones I have solved at scale. The procurement and administrative machinery of a public programme is something I would be learning with your team.
How would you work within a tender process?
Ideally before it. The most useful contribution is in the specification, because a tender that describes screens locks in a design nobody has validated with an officer or a farmer. Writing outcomes and field conditions into the requirement instead gives you something you can hold a vendor to.
Can advisory content be maintained by the department itself?
It has to be, and it should be a stated requirement rather than an assumption. That means a content model your agronomists can edit by district and season without a vendor ticket. If a crop advisory cannot be corrected in a week during an outbreak, the system is not fit for the job it was bought for.
What about farmers with no smartphone?
They are the majority in many districts and the design should start with them. Voice, feature phone channels and agent-mediated delivery are the primary route, with the app as one channel among several. Delivery channel mix drives cost, coverage and the reporting design all at once.
What this record is, and what it is not
No public sector programme has been delivered directly, and nothing on this page pretends otherwise. What is here is advisory delivery at national scale in seven languages, and institutional partners with their own approval chains and their own brand risk: ICICI Bank, Vodafone, Idea and TAFE. The product problems of extension delivery are solved ones. The procurement machinery would be learned alongside your team.
Published elsewhere
- PodcastLearnings from 10M downloads with AgriCentral PM Akanksha BarotThe Crop Chronicles, by Jiva. Episode 5, 31 minutes
How AgriCentral reached ten million downloads, why the first year of adoption was slow, and what transferred to Indonesia.
- InterviewLessons from 10 million downloadsJiva, on Medium
The written version. Acquisition, the seven languages, and the interface decisions that came out of watching farmers hold a phone.