The fourth industrial revolution, agricultural and rural innovation, and implications for public policy and investments: a case of India

Abstract

AbstractThe Indian Government and public–private partnerships are developing and disseminating a dizzying number of innovative, networked solutions, broadly known as the Digital India initiative, to increase the efficiency of safety nets and worker productivity and to improve life. Yet, challenges to turn the power of information and other technologies into a farmer‐friendly technological revolution for India's 156 million rural households are considerable, including: (1) reliable, up‐to‐date, location‐specific message content for a diverse agriculture to help stratified households shift to productive, knowledge‐intensive agriculture as a business—government, private sector, and civil society have big roles to play; (2) digital literacy, i.e., teaching farmers how to choose and use apps, even where the digital divide is absent; apps are, or soon to be, in regional languages; and (3) monitoring actual use and impacts on users’ lives by understanding the adoption and adaptation processes. These challenges call for bottom‐up, complementary investments in physical, human, and institutional capital, and farmer‐friendly e‐platforms, while forging ahead with many top‐down policy and institutional reforms currently underway, in which progress is real and constraints holding back greater success are better understood.