KisanVaani is an AI crop advisory that speaks the farmer’s language over ordinary voice calls and SMS, diagnoses crop disease from photos with Gemini, and aggregates queries into district-level outbreak early warnings. Built for the roughly 45% of rural India that smartphone apps do not reach.
Dozens of advisory apps exist for smartphone owners with data plans who are comfortable reading text in English or Hindi. The farmers losing the most to crop disease are precisely the ones outside that group: feature phones, patchy 2G, oral-first communication. The MP’s problem statement asks for exactly this: “a voice & SMS crop advisory in Indic languages with AI disease diagnosis from farmer photos, designed for low-connectivity, non-smartphone farmers.” KisanVaani implements that, end to end.
A farmer dials a simple phone number (a toll-free 1800 line via Exotel in production) and speaks in their own language. The AI understands the query and answers on the same call. No literacy, internet connection, or app required.
Shorthand like “KAPAS PILA PATTA” gets a native-script reply with exact dosages, within two SMS segments. Works on 2G feature phones.
One smartphone per village is enough. A relay worker sends a leaf photo; Gemini diagnoses the disease; the farmer receives a voice note in their language.
Each module addresses part of the MP’s problem statement. All six share one data layer, so each interaction adds to the district picture.
Ranked, explained crop choices reasoned by Gemini from ISRIC 250 m soil grids, Government of India Soil Health Card records, 16-day weather, and ICAR agronomy.
IMD-threshold detection over each registered district identifies the affected blocks and sends voice and SMS guidance only to farmers inside the zone.
Farmers send a crop photo or a voice note in any language; Gemini diagnoses and replies with a voice note. Feature-phone users receive the advisory by SMS.
Low-confidence or severe cases become tickets routed to Rythu Seva Kendras and Krishi Vigyan Kendras with a 48-hour SLA. AI answers first; specialists review.
Modal prices from the Agmarknet open API (Directorate of Marketing and Inspection), available on the same IVR call: press 2 for bhav.
Farmers speak in their own language; Gemini detects it from the audio and answers in the same language. No menus, no settings, no literacy assumed.
Weather forecasts powered by Open-Meteo & IMD Agromet Advisory Services.
Call, SMS, or photo, on whatever phone they already own.
Indic speech and shorthand parsed; photos diagnosed with structured, schema-enforced output.
Spoken or SMS reply in the farmer's language: IPM-first steps with exact, safe dosages.
Each query is a geotagged signal. Clusters of similar reports become outbreak alerts for nearby farmers.
Every call, SMS and photo is a structured, geotagged data point. When 23 leaf-curl reports cluster in one block in a week, KisanVaani flags the outbreak and lets the District Agriculture Officer broadcast a voice and SMS alert to every registered farmer within 5 km, days beforethe outbreak becomes visible crop loss. This is the “Alert” in the track’s name: the same queries that serve individual farmers give the district administration advance warning.
Open the command centerToll-free line and SMS shortcode live across blocks. Onboarding via gram panchayat and KVK; farmers register with one missed call.
Full district coverage. KVK scientists review low-confidence diagnoses; each correction improves the advisory corpus. Automated outbreak alerts run continuously.
About 6 advisories and 2 alerts per farmer per season: IVR minutes ≈ ₹8, SMS ≈ ₹1.2, Gemini Flash inference under ₹1. Less than the cost of a single wasted pesticide spray.