Smallholder’s Access to Information and Communications Technologies
My earliest recollections on
issues of access to small
holder farmers’ access to Information and Communication Technologies are
with the introduction of the radio. I had recently migrated from Kenya to India
in the early 1970 to study and so everything was new and strange to me,
including Indian village life.My family had a farm in a village
in Telengana in South-Central India. Villagers from the village would gather daily
at around 6:30 in the evening at the Panchayat (Community) building to listen
to Krishi Darshan (Farmer’s Voice). The radio, a valve set operated on
electricity and receiving broadcasts in the medium wave (MW) band, was kept in
cupboard under lock and key in the Panchayat building was. It was hooked up to
a large trumpet like loud speaker on a wooden pole outside the building. The
village children would gather in the front, after whom the ordinary male
villagers sit on their haunches on the ground and finally the village Sarpanch
(village leader) who was usually the largest and richest landowner on a wooden
chair. There were rarely any women as socially they were not allowed to mix
with the males. The radio program would be for an hour in the local language
but usually as spoken (or actually written in the program’s script) by the
highly educated and not in the dialect of the ordinary villager. The villagers
could many a times not fully comprehend the program because of the rather
“snooty” language. There would be a talk on a farming practice and sometimes an
interview. Following the farmers program there would be broadcast of folk songs
or a small educational skit. At 8:00 O’clock there would be the news and after
it the session for the village radio would end and the radio safely locked in
the cupboard. The Panchayat building was one of the few buildings that had
electricity. There was always disappointment when there was no electricity and
the radio could not operate.
This scene reveals a lot
regarding ICTs and their access for the resource poor farmer then. The control
of the ICT in the hands of the Sarpanch who also had the only capacity to
operate the radio in the village, the hierarchy, class, caste and gender differences
in the village community in the access to its broadcast, the design and
delivery of content and the problems regarding necessary infrastructure such as
electricity needed to effectively use the technology.
The stranglehold on real control
and access to the radio in villages in India was only broken when lower cost
“transistor” radios made domestically were available in the market. Then the
radio could be owned and controlled by the farmer, he could carry it to his
field and the women in the family could listen to some of the programs in the
evening in the privacy and seclusion of their homes. Of course, there were
several social concerns expressed on the “bad” influence of the radio on the
youth and women when the radio became more ubiquitous.
The same scene repeated itself
when television, initially through the Satellite
Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) and later through terrestrial
broadcast was introduced. Instead of the radio in the Panchayat building, there
was the black and white TV set. However, for TV, it took more time to spread to
be used by villagers. This was not only because of cost but also because it
needed electricity to operate and not many homes, especially among the poor,
had access to electricity. But things changed, when the cost of TV was reduced
through production in India, cable TV became widespread and electricity
connections in villages became more common. But on the whole for contributing to
innovating farming and agriculture, it was largely a missed opportunity in
using a powerful ICT. The content for farming and agriculture, largely from the
Government in an initially Government controlled media, was not paid attention
to as an important public function. And the private sector with very little
commercial benefit in generating the content just ignored agriculture till
recently. Now that rural incomes have grown and farmers are becoming consumers
of products such as soap, cosmetics, refrigerators and washing machines in
addition to tractors and farm equipment some attention is being paid.
Ownership of phones in India till
late 1990s was only in the hands of a few. In villages, it was usually the
richest that had a phone connection. All this changed when the public call
offices (PCO) were introduced in India. Soon all villages had at least one PCO.
The cost of making a phone call was also reduced and almost everybody could use
it. Within a few years the cell phone was introduced and this brought in the
shift in the ownership and control of the communication device. Along with it,
the Government introduced policies that made phone calls affordable by even the
poor. Soon, many of the poor farmers had cell phones which they could use at
their will and convenience. Today India has almost 800 million cell phone
connections and is now ubiquitous. With cell phones came several new services,
including the Kisan Call Centres where farmers could call up Government run
Extension services for assistance on their farming problems. However certain
other issues in access continued such as the use of cell phones by rural women.
In a country where women provide the majority of the agricultural workforce and
many of these manage farms on their own not being able to by social barriers
use cell phones and other ICTs is a major constraint for rapid innovation and
capacity development needed for modern farming in the country.
The new generation of ICTs coming
into common use in rural India is the Smart Phone. The Smart Phone promises
access to the instant messaging, the World Wide Web, Audio and Video recording,
playback and streaming, ability to send and receive multimedia and participate
in social media etc. Some Smart Phones can even use applications that can share,
exchange and process data and support decision making. This has the potential
to revolutionize access to information from across the world by farmers. At the moment the same issues as with other
ICTs in the past such as of its access, affordability, the generation and
design of the content so that it is relevant and useful, the capacity to make
effective use of the information are being repeated. Apparently, we need to
study the past and learn from it to be prepared for ICTs to be more useful in
the present and the future.
Ajit Maru
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