| Pub. Date | : November, 2021 |
|---|---|
| Product Name | : The IUP Journal of Marketing Management |
| Product Type | : Article |
| Product Code | : IJMM111121 |
| Author Name | : Police Keerthi and Vikas Gautam |
| Availability | : YES |
| Subject/Domain | : Marketing |
| Download Format | : PDF Format |
| No. of Pages | : 10 |
Agriculture is considered the main driving force in the Indian economy employing around 42% of the country's labor force and generating 18% of national GDP. Indian agriculture sector is facing numerous challenges, including non-adoption of agricultural technology at the farm level due to farmers' lack of access to the latest information. Farmers need to take timely effective farming decisions for improving productivity and their revenue. These decisions may be contingent on the information available to them. The government-funded extension services failed to meet the changing needs of farmers and they need to look for alternative sources of information. Mobile phones act as a good source of information dissemination. This facilitates the farming community in practicing sustainable practices. Given the important role mobile phones play in the agriculture sector, this study attempts to review the literature on factors influencing the adoption of mobile phones by farmers. The factors identified in the review are broadly categorized using content analysis. The findings revealed that there was a huge focus on studying the influence of demographic and socioeconomic factors on adoption in extant literature. Despite testing the impact of these variables in many studies, the influence of these variables on mobile phone adoption is inconclusive.
Agriculture is considered as the main driving force in the Indian economy employing 41.49% (Statista, 2020) of the country's labor force and generating 17.76% of national GDP (Statistics Times, 2021). "Everything can wait, but not agriculture," said the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. This statement holds true even today (The Indian Express, 2014). Farmers need to take timely effective farming decisions for improving agriculture productivity and their revenue. These decisions may be contingent on the information available to them. In developing nations, the dissemination of information to farmers is generally done by government-funded extension services, which could not meet the changing needs of farmers (Ali, 2012). At the national level in India, for instance, the ratio of agriculture extension officers to farmers is as low as 1:1162 (The HansIndia, 2018; and Nendumaran and Ravi, 2019) against the recommended ratio of 1:750. With such a low ratio of extension officers to farmers, timely information