<aside> 👉🏾 This chapter describes our efforts of building a bridge between farming community and public crop price database on WhatsApp.

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Snapshot

<aside> 🌟 In late 2021, a WhatsApp Chatbot named “Bolbhav” was launched to enable farmers to easily access the Agmarknet database and state webportals. In two years of its operations until 7th December 2023, Bolbhav had over 265,000 registered users with over 75,000 Weekly Active users and had answered over 15 million queries.

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How did the chatbot work?

Three crop price related use cases

Mandi price

A user can see latest prices of all the crop in a mandi. In addition to prices mandi holiday information is also shown. If crop prices are not available, then a list of alternative mandis where prices are available is shared.

⚡✨ Chaurai Market ✨🔊

👉 Now you can know daily mandi prices on WhatsApp by clicking on this link:https://bolbhav.in/मंडी-भाव 👉 Prices per Quintal: Minimum - Average - Maximum

🌱 Gram Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 4800 - 5251 - 5305

🌱 Maize Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 1951 - 2013 - 2031

🌱 Wheat Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 2380 - 2420 - 2425

Comparative price

Every district will be mapped to the neighbouring districts. Whenever, any user asks prices for any crop, he will be shown prices that are updated in the last five days from 20 different mandis in following order

1. mandis from their own district
2. mandis from their neighbouring districts
3. mandis from the remaining state

⚡✨ Soyabean ✨🔊

👉 Now you can know daily mandi prices on WhatsApp by clicking on this link:https://bolbhav.in/मंडी-भाव 👉 Prices per Quintal: Minimum - Average - Maximum

🌱 Chhindwara Mandi Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 4800 - 5251 - 5305

🌱 Chaurai Mandi Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 4620 - 5150 - 5290

🌱 Seoni Mandi Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 4850 - 5200 - 5400

Price Trend

Say, a user would like to know the prices of a particular crop in a particular mandi so he/she can send in the mandi name and the crop name. The flow will then showcase the price of that particular crop in that particular mandi for the last 30 days.

⚡✨ Soyabean in Chhindwara Mandi ✨🔊

👉 Now you can know daily mandi prices on WhatsApp by clicking on this link:https://bolbhav.in/मंडी-भाव 👉 Prices per Quintal: Minimum - Average - Maximum

🌱 Date: 13/08/2023 Price: 4800 - 5251 - 5305

🌱 Date: 12/08/2023 Price: 4620 - 5150 - 5290

🌱 Date: 11/08/2023 Price: 4850 - 5200 - 5400

How was the chatbot accessible to people with limited literacy?

1. A farmer could write a simple message like chaurai mandi price, the chatbot would understand the intent of the query using NLP and fetch the latest data and show it to the users in an easy to understand language.