Mobile Applications for Agriculture and Allied Sector

Abstract

Agriculture continues to be the most important sector of the Indian economy and agriculture is a more or less a compulsion for livelihood of million of farmers. Land and water resources have almost reached their limits, price of commodities are fluctuating almost every day, profit are negligible for most of the marginal and small farmers and most of all getting information is cumbersome. In Indian most of the population is dependent on agriculture so there is a need to review and revitalize the mechanism for updating the technology. Majority of the Indian farmers are small-scale producers and are often unable to access the information and technological resources that could increase the yield and lead to better prices for their crops and products. In order to tackle this problem the wide spread network of mobile phones came to the rescue. The mobile phone based solution helps in farm management, leading improvement in agricultural yield and helps in care/maintenance of the farms thus leading agriculture field to its zenith. In present day agriculture, soft resources like knowledge and skill are as important as hard resources like inputs, and sometime more important. But estimate indicate that 60% of farmers do not access any source of information for advanced agricultural technologies resulting in huge adoption gap. The requirement of field level extension personnel is estimated to be about 1.3-1.5 million against the present availability of about 0.1 million personnel