Govt's mobile apps for farmers hit an infrastructure firewall

Low digital literacy and smartphone penetration limits downloads among farmers

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have launched several mobile applications to assist farmers in agricultural activities by providing information regarding sowing, harvesting, weather and crop price but the initiative has received a lukewarm response from the farming community so far.

Even after launching more than 11 mobile apps for farmers, the cumulative downloads in last one year stands at 3,98,593, according to the department of electronics and information technology.

According to experts, the limited response from the country’s farming community is due to poor digital literacy and limited smartphone and internet penetration among them. Farmers also said that they have not been availing services and advisories including those related to crop care and mandi prices, among others.

“Literacy ratio in the farming community, at the rural and regional level, is still poor. Coupled with limited internet penetration, these issues fail to accrue benefits for farmers. Government and other agricultural bodies have launched several applications for farmers but due to all these reasons, so far overall responses have not been so encouraging,” said Naveen Mathur, head of business development, CSQ and market communication, Multi Commodity Exchange.

According to Mathur, the apps have found takers mostly among farmers in urban areas, as against rural areas.
Experts also believe that the lack of customised information is also a factor that has dispirited farmers with most of the applications providing generic information. Farmers with local sources have access to better and swift information, which is also a reason why they do not prefer downloading the applications.

“Many farmers are not using smartphones in villages, thereby, rendering these applications useless for us in agriculture. Moreover, several of these apps lack speciality services. Most of the information served by these apps is common and known to most farmers. There is no new or unique information sharing that has led to a lack of eagerness among farmers to use the mobile applications,” said Ramesh Bhorania, a farmer from Naranaka village of Gujarat.
 
Government-promoted apps also face stiff competition from other agriculture-related mobile apps that provide faster updates for farmers, especially for services like crop price information and weather updates.

Ritesh Kumar Sahi- a research analyst for agri-commodities at Angel Broking, believes that an area-specific and crop-specific information would work better, given the climatic and crop diversity of each state.