Drought and desertification are serious problems that significantly affect hundreds of millions of
people and ecosystems. When drought occurs, the farm communities are usually the first to be
affected because of their heavy dependence on the stored soil water. If the rainfall deficiencies
continue, even people who are not directly engaged in agriculture will be affected by drought.
This underscores the vulnerability of entire societies to this phenomenon; this vulnerability
varies significantly from one nation to another. Although crisis management approach is
routinely followed approach for providing relief, the studies on drought, carried out in different
parts of the world, suggested that preparedness is better than relief and information is backbone
of drought preparedness. However, the efforts have been taken for generating micro-level
drought assessment and early warning is least understood until recent years. It was therefore, in
this study, an attempt has been made to develop a micro-level drought preparedness framework
to support rural farm families.
The established practices such as Sources of Agricultural Information management
(International/National/Extra-Institutional), Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
Enabled Rural Knowledge Centres (RKC), Open and Distance Learning Methods, micro-level
drought assessment and early Warning technique have been identified as key components in
developing such framework. These components were considered as the objectives of this
research study, and conducted series of studies and experiments to understand the existing
approaches and needed arrangements in defining and developing proposed framework. For each
finding reported in the experimental objectives, a clear chain of evidence was established
Abstract
supported also by interview statements. The individual micro-level drought preparedness
framework components were integrated carefully, based on the series of findings, systemic
analysis of the data and the continuous interpretation of the observations, to develop the
proposed framework.
The study concludes that the proposed framework has shown a way to improve micro-level
drought preparedness by bringing various ICT tools, information management techniques, open
learning approaches, and micro-level drought assessment technique under one umbrella with an
intermediary entity called ICT enabled RKCs owned and run by rural farm families. The
usability evaluation studies on individual components revealed that the approaches such as these
will have implications in planning micro-level drought preparedness strategies. The vulnerable
rural families now have the means to estimate their own vulnerability and can use the
information available at ICT enabled RKCs to make more informed decisions, which offers a
sounder basis for designing drought preparedness and adaptation strategies
