An Innovative ICT Approach to Evaluate and Enhance Delivery of Government of Tamil Nadu Advisory Messages to Farmers

Abstract

Over 52% of India’s population depends on agriculture but generates merely 13.9% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). With fragmented landholdings, the number of independent farmers has risen to 88 million with near-stagnant productivity. Despite the Central and State Governments initiating many reforms in agricultural extension in India, there continue to be serious information gaps between farmers, extension workers and agricultural scientists. In the state of Tamil Nadu, small and marginal farmers have a share of more than 90% of the 8 million total land holdings. And it is these farmers who still find it difficult to access quality information when they need it the most. The Government of Tamil Nadu, with the aim of providing farmers the latest farming and crop-related information using ICT tools, has launched a service to relay agricultural advisories by means of a ‘PUSH’ voice-message to farmers in five delta districts. A mechanism of gaining feedback on different aspects of this service was embedded in the ‘PUSH’ messages itself. The paper presents how such a technique adds to the agility of service-delivery and improves the service even while it is being deployed. The results indicate that ICT does have a transformative potential – empowering farmers to convey feedback in real-time and enabling the Government to respond in a timely manner based on the feedback. At a broader level, whether evaluation, feedback and modification can be made part of the ICT service delivery itself, enabling better-targeting and better delivery of services, is discussed.