Farmers can bargain with traders from a position of strength when they have up-to-date, or current, market information. By delivering clear pricing signals from urban customers, also enables the geographical distribution of items from rural to urban areas and between urban marketplaces.
It also enables merchants to make more informed decisions about the viability of intra-seasonal and maybe inter-seasonal storage. Furthermore, this type of data is useful to agricultural planners and researchers, and it can contribute significantly to our understanding of urban food marketing systems.
Farmers who grow cash crops are frequently abused by middlemen in underdeveloped nations due to high transportation costs, a lack of reliable price information, and the inability to evaluate the quality of the supply.
Economists and policymakers are increasingly recognizing that this diminishes farmer profitability and weakens incentives to produce and manage quality, resulting in negative effects. Rural farmers in western Rajasthan are illiterate, and the majority of ICT applications are demonstrated and run in the English language.
The bulk of these rural farmers are illiterates with a poor command of the English language, making it difficult for them to make use of the availability of ICT to improve their access to information. According to a survey, 77.72 percent of farmers require market information for agricultural output, while 65.72 percent require information on government schemes such as subsidies, import, and export policies for agriculture production.
Furthermore, 47.83 percent of farmers require information on bank loans. Farmers also noted transportation facilities (53.72%), water management, and other topics (34.28 percent ).
Farmers in general sought information from newspapers, fellow farmers, and government agencies, while a few farmers also sought information from other sources such as television, magazines, agricultural exhibitions, and so on. The majority of farmers (41.72 percent) utilized television to listen to agricultural news because it is readily accessible in rural areas, according to the findings.
Newspapers are widely regarded as the most significant means of communication in rural areas since they are readily available and published in the local language. The Indian government has made a number of steps to promote the use and use of information technologies in agriculture.
Both the central and state governments are now attempting to create ICT infrastructure in all rural areas (particularly Maharashtra) in order to aid rural development.
Also Read: Role Of Agricultural Technologies In Adapting Climate Change.
