Mobile Application in Agriculture Development in India: Policy, Practices and the Way Forward

The chapter attempts to scrutinize the role of mobile application in agricultural development in India. Further, this paper emphasizes the issues and challenges to implement a policy related to the use of a mobile application. Broadly, the mobile application helps to collect data from the field. It includes the collection of ground data, infrastructure facilities, asset mapping, disaster management, incident alerting, etc. The recent advancements in smartphones, GPS, wireless networks and Web GIS have facilitated the development of customized mobile applications for domain-specific attribute data collection with geo-tagging and field photographs. The mobile applications not only help in standardizing the data collection process but also help the user to collect the field information at ease and in a systematic manner through the rich graphical user interface (GUI). Hence, the objectives of the study are: i) to study the role of mobile application in agriculture development and their challenges; ii) to analyse policy implementation and issues related to using mobile applications at the field level and iii) to examine the impact of this application on farmers at the field level. The study is based on a quantitative research method and the study also analysed these facts from the peer-reviewed literature and books published by the academicians.