A Study on Farmers’ Perception about Uzhavan App in Select Districts of Tamil Nadu

Abstract

ICT provides more facilities to farmers by introducing agricultural mobile apps and encourage the farmers for effective farming. These mobile apps provide agriculture related information to farmers in timely and cost effective manner. The present study is carried out to find the farmers perception on uzhavan app which is developed by Government of Tamil Nadu. More than 5 lakh farmers have registered in this app and get various benefits. The uzhavan app has been used by many farmers in gaining more information about agricultural activities. Respondents revealed that dissemination of information through the uzhavan app is valuable and user friendly. The major challenges faced by the farmers were network problem mainly during the ATMA training registration, lack of price details of few commodity and in minor problem time consumes to use all services, app is quite difficult to use due to poor content visibility. From the study, it has been found that majority of farmers had good perception about the uzhavan app and they are satisfied with the features that support them in farming and they also expect some other features need to be integrated in uzhavan mobile app. The uzhavan app provides real time market price of some agricultural commodities and it has greater impact in selling farmers produce at fair price in mandis. Meanwhile, the features of e market online platform helps farmers to connects directly with traders and sell their produce at good price. The availability of farm guide in app provides information regarding fertilizer recommendations practices where most of sample respondents adopted recommended usage level and has positive impact in farming by increasing the yield of farmers.