TeleSupport India was a European-Indian framework to develop and test a model for two-way communication between rural communities in selected regions of India and European and Indian knowledge centres and networks to find solutions to local problems in agriculture and natural resources management.Direct beneficiaries were the participating women and farmer groups in local communities in Kerala and west Bengal who had access to good practices and technologies developed, while Indian NGOs benefited from improved information services for their extension programmes.

The ECCP TeleSupport project was implemented in 2006-2007 with the following project partners:

• Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich, UK (Lead Organization)
• Rural Agency for Social and Technological Advancement (RASTA), Kerala, India
• Change Initiatives, West Bengal, India
• Centre for Advancement of Sustainable Agriculture (CASA), New Delhi, India
• Deccan Development Society (DDS), Hyderabad, India
• Livestock Improvement Federation Network, Tamil Nadu, India
• Fallownet Expert Network on soil fertility
• Nedworc Foundation, the Netherlands
• InfoBridge Foundation, the Netherlands.

Key thematic focus: Soil fertility, Livestock, Post-harvest, IPM and Gender in development.

Project activities were:

• Developing an Institutional framework for sustained interaction
• Building Good Practices module on the Share4Dev Knowledge Base
• Setting up a TeleSupport-India Repository
• Capacity development in web-based information and knowledge sharing
• Documenting good practices (GPs)
• Video recording of selected GPs
• Upgrading local information centres for information sharing
• Testing problem-solving using GPs and expert-farmer interaction.

NRI experts were focusing on the capacity development on the key themes of the project. Focus of the InfoBridge Foundation experts was on capacity development on knowledge sharing, networking and on setting up  the web-based interaction tools and TeleSupport India Repository. Indian partners focused on needs assessments in their regions, capturing good practices in sustainable agriculture and natural resource management (in documents and videos), on the expert-farmer interaction, local networking and the dissemination of the captured knowledge within their networks and to their local communities.

Reports of the TeleSupport-India project can be found under 'Key Documents'.