Transforming Indian Agriculture with Digital Technologies

Abstract

Agriculture continues to be the most important sector of the Indian economy and agriculture is a more or less a compulsion for livelihood of millions of farmers. Now-a-days, Indian agriculture faces several problems such as low yield, inconsistent product quality, lack of knowledge about domestic as well as international markets and poor access to diversified agriculture information. Farmers need location specific information at the time of all the cultivation stages of agriculture in their local language. To meet out these problems, adoption of digital technology is one which improves the information transmission speed, networking, communication at their doorsteps and provides quality information in an understandable way to the farmers. Digital communication technologies when applied to condition in rural areas can help to improve communication by increasing the participation and also disseminating various information to increase their knowledge and skills. Digital efforts are being tried out by different Governments for the betterment of the agricultural sector and farmers. The digital technology in India is now at the crucial stage. Various digital initiatives such as Digital green, mobile technology, e-Choupal, precision farming, agricultural drones etc. should be promoted at large scale to improve the adoption of new technology by farmers. By this we can solve the problems like low yield, inconsistent product quality, lack of knowledge about domestic as well as international markets and poor access to diversified agriculture information.