Mobile Based Agro Advisory Service and Farmer’s Willingness to Pay: A Case Study in Bageshwar District of Uttarakhand

The study was conducted on randomly selected 64 farmers using Reuters Market Light’s (RML) short message service (SMS) for agro-advisories in Bageshwar District of Uttarakhand. The objectives of the study were to analyse socioeconomic characteristics of the users, their major sources of information agriculture, willingness to pay for the SMS service, their distribution as per the amount they were willing to pay per annum, their preference for the specific SMS for which they wanted to pay and the factors which determined their willingness to pay behaviour for the SMS services. A Probit Regression Model was used to estimate the impact of socioeconomic and other variables on the willingness to pay (WTP) behaviour of the farmers. Results showed that majority of the farmer users were middle aged (40.60%) followed by young (37.50%). Most of the respondents had their education up to middle school (43.75%) followed by inter college (31.2%) Majority of the farmers had 0.026-0.53 ha of land (87.50%), were both members and office bearers in the social organization (59.40%) and did not have any training experience regarding agriculture (54.70%). ‘RML’, ‘progressive farmers’, ‘SHGs/NGOs/Famers’ clubs’ and input retailer were found to be 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th source of getting information by the respondents. It was found that 70.31 per cent of the beneficiaries were willing to pay for accessing RML’s SMS and among them majority of the farmers (42.22%) were willing to pay Rs. 201–300 per annum for this service. The most preferred SMS advisories were found to be on pest and disease management followed by improved vegetable production technology. The willingness to pay behaviour was found to have significant and positive relationship with age, education, and training experience of the farmers.