Use of Information by Agricultural Households in India: Determinants and Preferences

The NSSO report (2015) shows that 41 percent of the rural households in India have accessed information and 34 percent households have used them. This paper explores the households’ use of information and understand their preference of information sources and their determinants. Households with better socio-economic conditions access information and from multiple sources. Media has the highest access while public sources have the lowest. Most of the households accessing information use it but the source-wise adoption rates show that, the source with the highest access, media, has the lowest use. This study tries to identify potential factors that lead to a systematic difference in using patterns across households and also across sources. Almost 80 percent of the households accessing information have used it and those not using information have cited lack of credit as a big hurdle to adoption among other reasons. Source-wise disaggregation of use shows that media has the lowest use at around 60 percent, even though it is the highest accessed resource. For all other sources, the share hovers around 80 to 90 percent. The analysis uses a Heckman Selection model to identify the potential factors that drive information use and also the differences between users and non-users of information from media. Overall, use of information is driven more by education and availability of credit than by other factors directly. Caste doesn’t appear to be a significant determinant of use directly, but obviously through the caste dynamics that shape different outcomes like education, access to information and access to credit. This analysis finds evidence to support the existing argument that development of human capital is crucial in processing information and using it for efficiency gains.