Dissemination of Knowledge in Agriculture : Where Does Old ICT Stand in Disseminating Knowledge Among Farmers?

This paper analyses the role of old information and communication technologies (ICTs) in disseminating knowledge in Indian agriculture. Based on the National Sample Survey data, the paper has verified the diffusion of old ICTs among the farm households and its application in disseminating agricultural knowledge. Second, the study intends to understand the underlying dynamics among farmers for adopting ICTs as a source of information than other sources. The data enable us to classify the agricultural knowledge into two different categories – knowledge on cultivation and knowledge on allied activities. The cultivation knowledge includes knowledge on farm technology, farm management, harvesting or marketing and others while allied activities include both animal husbandry and fishery. To examine, the knowledge dissemination in agricultural sector, the paper has adopted descriptive analysis while in order to understand the factors that explain the difference between adopters and the non-adopters of ICTs as the source of knowledge dissemination, we have employed logistic regression. The estimated result shows that all ICT indicators in our study mostly disseminate agricultural knowledge in the form of farm technology and farm management. Among all the three ICT indicators, only newspaper contributes significantly in disseminating knowledge on harvesting or marketing. The result on maximum likelihood analysis illustrates that among the households’ characteristics demonstration effect, economic status of the household, type of the households, farmers with formal training and the household’s size have proved to have the positive impact on choosing ICTs as a source of agricultural knowledge