Associative relationship between ICT indicators and socio-personal and economic characteristics of the dairy farmer beneficiaries under ICT enabled i-kisan project in Andhra Pradesh, India

In India, the government, non-governmental and private sectors have undertaken a large number of innovative initiatives in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to provide Information Technology services to agrarian community. In spite of the number of projects oriented towards the transfer of technologies through ICTs, still the acceptability and utilization of ICTs are very low in the rural areas. The present study was carried out to analyse the associative relationship between various ICT indicators and socio-personal and economic characteristics of the dairy farmers of Andhra Pradesh. Ex-post-facto research design was used in this study conducted in three districts in which ICT-Village Information Centres of i-kisan was working in Andhra Pradesh. Forty dairy farmers who were beneficiaries of i-kisan from each district were selected randomly. Thus, a total of 120 respondents constituted the sample for the study. It was found that variables like education, experience in dairying, land holding, income from dairying, annual gross income, social participation and exposure to ICT were found to have significant relationship with ICT use and skills of the respondents at various probability levels and age was found to have negatively significant relationship with ICT use. It could be concluded from the findings that if we focus more on education, training on ICT, income enhancement, social participation and exposure to ICT of the respondents we can improve ICT use and skills of the farmers.