About LifeLines

The LifeLines India service was born of a dream to create a digital inclusion programme that would make a real difference to people’s lives in rural India by improving their access to technology and information, and narrowing the digital divide for them.

This dream came into fruition under the partnership of British Telecom, CISCO Systems and OneWorld in September 2006 with the launch of LifeLines as an information service for the agriculture sector, catering to rural areas in north and central India.

The strategic objectives of the LifeLines service are two-fold:

•  To increase livelihood and income opportunities for rural communities through access to key decisive information; and
•  To create a sustainable delivery model by concurrently creating a contextual knowledge base as queries get answered

LifeLines leverages a mix of internet and telephone technologies - to enable the provision of essential and demand-based information, advice and guidance to remote and rural communities in India through the medium of “voice, in the local language and within 24 hours.”

The modest initiative has today flourished into an impressive programme for grassroots knowledge delivery, covering:

• Over 150,000 farmer households across 3 states (Haryana,  Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the agriculture sector, and
• In Education domain LifeLines service is  being implemented on a toll free platform for Statewide implementation at Rajasthan
• The service recieves and responds to more than 600 calls in a day

Agricultural experts and educationists empaneled in the service, work to render advisory to LifeLines users in their relevant fields of information - whether pertaining to a pest-management solution to save a dying crop in the field, or about which best method to follow to tackle a tricky math problem in class VI.

A successful journey

In the last three years, Lifelines has covered much ground in successfully delivering digitally engineered information and knowledge systems to communities in remote rural locations across India; and the results today are well discernible -

Rural farmers and teachers alike are dialing LifeLines to connect to the information highway via phone where they can get solutions on a range of daily queries - teachers consulting on common classroom topics, and farmers obtaining advisory for their livestock and farm-based queries.

The growing interest in the service is visible as users employ their newly acquired knowledge on the ground - farmers adopting economically viable ,ecofriendly and sustainable practices and teachers employing new pedagogic techniques to make lessons more interesting in their classrooms and enhacing the quality education at schools.