The spread of cell phones in rural India could revolutionize agricultural productivity in the world’s second-most-populous country, a senior Indian researcher said last week.
“There is a huge potential in using mobile phone technology in agriculture,” Surabhi Mittal of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations said June 25.
“That is why there is a real move to expand the base.”
During a seminar sponsored by the International Development Research Council in Ottawa, Mittal said that most rural homes in India have at least one cell phone and unlike in Canada, service is good in most rural areas.
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She said results are encouraging from private and public pilot projects testing the ability of cell phone service and agriculture-specific messaging services to help farmers.
Sixty percent of India’s close to 200 million farmers work on less than five acres and typically have little information about agronomy, weather, marketing and prices.
Mittal said that is why productivity growth in India’s agricultural sector at 2.5 percent is just a fraction of India’s overall economic growth rate of eight percent.
Indian government policies guarantee prices and allow farmers to exist in a self-sufficiency model. “This deters farmers from looking at ways to improve productivity, move to higher valued crops, new varieties or expand,” she said.
Part of it is a lack of information.
The pilot projects show a strong potential to improve that by providing daily text messages or voice mail that offer advice on appropriate varieties, inputs, weather outlook, marketing opportunities and varieties.
“One of the most popular messages (in one of the pilot projects) was on government programs available and how they can access credit through that,” she said.
There are hurdles if the service is to become more universal.
Many small-scale Indian farmers are illiterate and text message updates are a problem.
Even if farm productivity increases, lack of rural infrastructure is a barrier to getting that increased production to market.
And there is opposition from some traders who are not happy that farmers now dependent on them for pricing information may be able to receive independent information about market prices that will give them some bargaining power.
But Mittal said the early results show that the most important information farmers can receive is about weather.
Prediction of rain can help farmers decide when to seed and whether to take crop off the fields into storage or leave it in the field overnight to dry.
She also said that a key issue for development of a credible cell phone support system for Indian agriculture is making sure that the information provided is accurate.
“The credibility of the information is key,” she said.
“This is at an early stage but I think mobile phones can be a tremendously important tool.”
International agricultural experts have calculated that an increase in Indian farm productivity could turn the country into a major player in food production and trade.
