Case study; The concept of ICT in Agriculture in India

ICT in agriculture is an emerging field focusing on the enhancement of agricultural and rural development in India. It involves application of innovative ways to use Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in the rural domain. The advancements in ICT can be utilised for providing accurate, timely, relevant information and services to the farmers, thereby facilitating an environment for more remunerative agriculture. Given the development scenario in Indian Agriculture, ICT movement is still evolving. However, all the ICT initiatives are not uniform with disparities between regions in the level and quality of telecommunications, information and the effort of individuals, public and private organizations, and differentiated nature of demand of the farmers in different areas. As a result, there have been many successes, failures, lessons learned and experience gained, so far.  While these initiatives are intended to address the needs of the farmers through ICT, their actual usage and their ability to bring significant impact on the farm productivity and socio-economic development of the intended beneficiaries is to be understood. It is relatively unknown as to whether the ultimate beneficiaries actually use the facilities provided for them meaningfully to meet their needs. The common problems in adoption of ICT in rural segments are ICT illiteracy, availability of relevant and localized contents in their own languages, easy and affordable accessibility and other issues such as awareness and willingness for adoption of new technologies among the rural peoples etc. One critical aspect in the usage of ICT’s for farmers and their groups, as seen in some of the ICT driven initiatives, is the involvement of human interface at the last mile indicating that there is a human dependency in transmission of Information/Knowledge to farmers.

Thus, there is a need to understand as to how far the ICT initiatives are able to address the farmers need so that better solutions can be developed to address those unmet needs.  The proposed research aims to study the past and present major ICT initiatives in agriculture in India, the extant of their success, the factors affecting the success as well as failure of such initiatives.   Based on this study, the project will develop and suggest appropriate ICT models to meet farmer’s information needs for different selected scenarios considering the infrastructural and social-economic constraints with some field testing within the existing infrastructure. The ICT models generated in this project can be expected to provide a framework for various stakeholders in agriculture in design and implementation of effective ICT based solutions for agriculture.