Diversified Use of Mobile Phones by the Farmers in Bangladesh for Receiving Agricultural Information

Abstract

Bangladesh has a population of about 165 million in an area of 147,570 sq km. The total number of mobile phone subscribers has reached 93.788 million at the end of June 2012. People use their mobile phones for many purposes, such as talking with friends and relatives, getting medical-and health-related advice through SMSs, paying electricity, gas and water bills in the bank, transferring money, forecasting on disasters, students’ submission of admission documents to universities by sending SMSs. However, it has not been clearly demonstrated so that far how mobile phones are being used by farmers for receiving agricultural information. Hence, the present this study was undertaken to determine the extent of use of mobile phones by the farmers in receiving agricultural information and to explore the relationships between the selected characteristics of the farmers and their use of mobile phones. Data were collected from 76 mobile phone user farmers in eight selected villages of Boira and Bhabakhali unions under Sadar Upazila of Mymensingh district during 12 September–15 October 2011. In order to ascertain the extent of use of mobile phones by the farmers in receiving agricultural information on four major aspects, such as availability of inputs, quality of the inputs, market price of the inputs, appropriate doses of the inputs, covering 16 dimensions were cconsidered. Farmers were asked whether their contacts with different information sources were regular, occasional or not at all. Weights of 2, 1 and 0 were assigned to determine their overall use of mobile phones in receiving agricultural information. Extent of mobile phone use scores for each of the 16 dimensions was computed by using the mobile phone use index (MPUI). The MPUI for each of the aspects was calculated by multiplying with 2, 1 and 0 for regular, occasional and not at all contact respectively. Hence, the MPUI for each aspect could vary from 0 to 152, 0 indicating no use and 152 very high use of mobile phones. More than half (54%) of the farmers had medium use of mobile phones in receiving agricultural information while 14% and 32% of them had low and high use of mobile phones, respectively. Literacy level, annual income, cosmopoliteness, agricultural knowledge, aspiration, self-confidence and attitude towards the technology of the farmers had significant positive relationships with their use of mobile phones. However, age of the mobile phone users had significant negative relationship while the farm size and organisational participation of the farmers had no relationships with their use of mobile phones.