Willingness to Pay for Mobile Advisory Services-Analyzing the Outlook of Dairy Farmers

Mobile Phones and Internet services are key aspects to the economic growth of a country. To leverage the full potential of information dissemination enabled by mobile telephony along with support infrastructure and capacity building amongst farmers, it is essential to ensure the quality of information, its timeliness and trustworthiness. ICAR-NDRI Karnal, launched a messaging portal in October 2014 for advisory services exclusively for dairying. To assess the adoption of scientific dairy farming practices disseminated through NDRI messaging portal the present study was conducted in six states namely Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Gujarat. One district from each state selected and 50 dairy farmers who are enrolled in NDRI-MS were selected randomly. In this way a total of 300 farmers were selected randomly for the present investigation. Majority (90.00%) of the respondents using mobile phones for calling paravets for A.I and pregnancy diagnosis. About 69.82 per cent of the respondents needed information related to animal healthcare practices while 69.33 per cent of the respondents needed information related to animal breeding practices. It was observed that Paravets were the most important source utilized by the respondents (13.29%) followed by SMS from mobile phones (12.57%) and input dealers (12.43%) to utilize information related to different livestock practices. As perceived by the respondents, direct information from the institute was the major potential of mobile advisory services while unavailability of two way verbal communication as a major pitfall of NDRI SMS service. When hypothetically bidding processing was performed to estimate the willingness to pay for mobile advisory services, it was found that 40.66 per cent of the farmers were willing to pay one rupee per day for mobile based advisory services.