Title
: Shurokkha: ICT-Based Tele-veterinary Services
Description
: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, there is legitimately a high degree of focus on safeguarding human health, but not as much on livestock health, based on which a large section of our population is dependent on for livelihood and nutrition. The most severely affected are the farmers who are failing to access livestock services due to disruption of the mobility of service providers such as community level Para-vets as well as professional Veterinarians. One of our field surveys finds that para-vets are attending around 30% of the cases compared to normal situations due to movement restrictions & misinformation and superstitions such as COVID-19 can be transmitted from cattle. Our findings also suggest that a very large majority of veterinarians are not going to the field, and are at home without much work and who would be happy to provide service during this time of national crisis.
From mPower, we have been working with remote veterinary consultation services called ‘SHUROKKHA’ for the last 7 years (mostly with development programs) in targeted locations and have provided the service to 20,000+ farmers. In this current situation, we would like to extend our service around the country. For availing the services, we have a ready mobile application freely downloadable from google play store which can be used by community level para-vets, and also farmers. Using the app, users will send livestock health and/or sickness data on the other end dedicated veterinarians will look into the sent data including images of sick animals and make direct phone calls to Para-vets and/or farmers for additional information. After making the diagnosis of animal health issues, the veterinarian will create and send digital prescription and/or advice to the Para-vet and/or the farmer through app notification and SMS. This will ensure optimal quality veterinary services. We are also developing a direct veterinary call-based services for those farmers and para-vets who do not have smartphones or have access to the Internet.
