The Promise and Challenges of Implementing ICT in Indian Agriculture

While agricultural productivity in the developing world has made tremendous advances in the past half century, productivity still lags well behind the developed world. One particularly promising path to improve agricultural productivity is to employ mobile phones to enable farmers to make better decisions: through advice on input choices, farming decisions, and input and output prices. This paper takes a close look at the potential of ICT to improve input decisions by assisting with the delivery of customized information about soil nutrient status. In South Asia, fertilizers are often overused or applied in inefficient proportions. Governments in India have invested heavily in soil testing, with the goal of distributing 140 million “Soil Health Cards” (SHCs) directly to farmers. Yet with absent additional information, farmers may have difficulty acting on the information provided in SHCs. The primary contribution of this paper is to evaluate the prospects for ICT to assist in the delivery of information about site-specific nutrient management practices. We report on results from a “lab in the field” experiment examining whether a dissemination approach that employs simplified SHCs, supplemented with audio or video messages, can contribute to the understanding of information in SHCs. We begin by examining the reach of traditional extension services in India, and find that they fall far short of universal coverage. If extension agents are not available, many farmers turn to local agricultural sales agents for advice. We describe results from an audit study evaluating the nature and quality of advice from these agents in the field.