Farmers’ perceptions towards establishing information and communication technology (ICT)-integrated centres in the marketing of Indian agriculture sector

The agriculture sector is one of the major dominant sectors in Indian GDP. In recent years ICT centres have been providing agricultural services and disseminating information related to price, crop, seeds quality, market, fertilizers, pesticides and weather forecasts etc. The study's main purpose is to find farmers' perception regarding Information and Communication Technology centres in India for marketing and accessing agricultural information. A total of 550 farmers' data were collected on the basis of purposive sampling from Rajasthan and Haryana states with the help of a structured questionnaire. The descriptive statistics, mean, standard deviation, independent t-test and one way ANOVA with post-hoc techniques were applied to analyse the responses via 23rd versions of SPSS. The result shows that ICT centres are proving important source of information for Indian agriculture sector. Based on farmers' characteristics, it can be concluded that no significant difference was found between age, income group and total land holding regarding ICT centres for agricultural information sources in India. But in education level and agricultural experience, farmers significantly differ in preference of ICT centre for agricultural information source. Another important finding was that Rajasthan farmers preferred more ICT centres as compared to Haryana for agricultural information sources.