CABI Direct2Farm: An Innovative Model of Rural Development Harnessing Mobile ICT

In India, agriculture plays a critical role in country's social and economic development. However, the share of agriculture towards India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has declined from 33% to 16% over the last three decades. Almost 70% of India's population lives in villages and over 60% are employed in agriculture and allied sectors. Hence, decline in agriculture production poses serious threat to both economic and food security of the nation. Access to information is one of the key challenges of smallholders, which impedes their ability to take informed decisions on crop choice, pest management, climatic vagaries and access to trade and market. On the other hand, increasing mobile network penetration has paved way for internet revolution in rural India, and it is expected that by 2014, 50% of the rural population of India will be using internet. Hence, innovative applications in Information Communication Technology (ICT) can be a game changer in turning around the dwindling agrarian production system and rural economy and has the potential to make farming a profitable venture. In this context, various mobile ICT services in agriculture sector were reviewed in terms of scale, scalability and sustainability potential. Commonwealth Agriculture Bioscience International (CABI) Direct2Farm is one such successful model, which has gone beyond the traditional concept of advisory and has created an info-mediary platform for the various actors in agriculture value chain, so as to reduce information asymmetries and knowledge gaps. At present, CABI Direct2Farm reaches out to over 400,000 farmers and 30,000 small and medium agri-businesses located in village clusters across six states of India, namely, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Unlike other mobile services, it captures detailed digital profiles of their users, which enables it to tailor-made information dissemination as per the need of individuals. It has been observed that there is a great demand from the farmers for such hyper-localised information, pertaining to specific variety of crop or breed of livestock.