IAALD AFITA WCCA2008 WORLD CONFERENCE ON AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION AND IT Improved Geo-ICT model GramyaVikas for rural development

A prototype Geo-ICT model, called GramyaVikas, was developed to assist the novice district/sub-district level distributed rural extension community in their planning processes and for mutual collaboration. The prototype was developed with various easily customizable and open-source platforms such as Plone (content management system) and ALOV MAP (for geo-spatial analysis). While exploring the functionalities and needs of the user community, certain technological modifications and advanced open-source systems useful in spatial domain (Plone 3.5.3, MpaServer, p.mapper, PostgreSQL), were used to improve GramyaVikas for better visualization, decision making and user-friendliness. Improved GramyaVikas offers a secure and interactive geo-information setvice to the user community. Rearranged/redesigned modules, functional improvements and envisaging future developments of GramyaVikas are briefly discussed in the manuscript