Empowering Agriculture: The Role of Mobile Applications in Transforming Agricultural Marketing

Agricultural marketing apps designed to help farmers and consumers have been transforming the sector, and improving the decision-making skills of the beneficiaries based on the real-time information provided by them. These apps provide information to farmers, to locate nearby markets, the price of commodities, input markets, export trends, and government policies; it helps consumers in locating markets, giving the quality and price of commodities. These apps also aim at providing direct linkage between farmers and consumers avoiding intermediaries and thereby increasing farmer’s share in consumer price. Previous research has explored the contribution of mobile apps in increasing production and productivity. This study is a modest attempt to explore agricultural marketing apps available in India and analyze their importance in decision-making for farmers and consumers through a primary survey using Google Forms. Our results indicate that half of the respondents are aware of different agricultural marketing apps but only 18.8% of them use them and that too rarely. The daily usage of agricultural marketing apps is very poor. The majority of the respondents feel the apps are not relevant to their needs. eNAM is the mostly used app, and is as popularbetter government-backed and credible; other privately developed apps are also among the respondents. These apps are primarily used to check crop prices and to locate nearby markets that fetch better prices. It is therefore necessary to improve the connectivity, affordability and reliability of these apps to enhance their usage for the better welfare of end-users and to improve the agricultural economy.