Economic impact of weather advisory services: a case of Varuna Mitra scheme in Karnataka

Despite the existence of various forecast services in India, the accuracy in their prediction is limited. To address this, the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre launched a scheme Varuna Mitra in 2010, which is considered superior to others on two counts: one, it is an interactive service, and two, it provides location specific weather forecast up to the panchayat level for a period of three days on a 12-hour cycle. In this paper, we have assessed the impact of Varuna Mitra from 1350 sample farmers distributed across nine districts of high, moderate and low rainfall regions. Data were collected with and without information from farmers for 2016–17 to examine the impact of the service. The calls were found to have increased at an annual rate of 61.55% from 6,565 in 2011 to 10.42 lakh in 2016. Results indicate a reduction in the cost of cultivation and post-harvest losses, improvements in the crop yields and net incomes. Overall, the farmers could realise incremental net gain of Rs 5,106 per acre from the forecast and Rs 18,005 in terms of per capita income.