ANNOUNCEMENTS
The deteriorating condition of Indian agriculture, a major sector of our economy is a matter of grave concern. Low agricultural yields in our country have been attributed to various factors. Some of these contributors of low yield point out to the lack of information among the farmers (regarding soil health, crop diseases and weather) along with the other macro factors. This is the case in spite of several informative tools already made available to the farmers but not performing to the desired level of satisfaction mainly because of their huge dependence on manpower and supply driven nature. Thus, recently a thrust is being given on the role of mobile applications as they provide demand driven and very easily accessible information on fingertips, involving minimum manpower. Ministry of Agriculture has put an emphasis on providing accurate and timely information regarding crops health, soil health, weather, plant disease, etc., via mobile applications to farmers, thereby, reducing their risk and improving crop productivity. Therefore, it is a matter of curiosity to find the impact of use of mobile applications based information on yield. The study has been conducted by carrying out household level data collection through purposive sampling of farmers of Kachhwa village in Karnal district of Haryana. Propensity Score Matching is used in order to draw comparison in yield between the groups of farmers using mobile application based information (treatment group) and those not (control group). The analysis has revealed a positive and significant impact of using mobile application based information on the agricultural yields. However, this needs to be accompanied with macro factors i.e. public investment, credit, subsidies etc. for maximizing the yields. The sub findings reveal that the farmers using apps as informative tools are more educated, operate on larger lands and rely less on other sources of information as compared to the farmers not using this informative tool.
Key Words: Mobile Applications based Information, Informative Tools in Agriculture, Propensity Score Matching
