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Paper short abstract:

Farmers’ social connections form a principal platform for learning and knowledge-sharing & emerging mobile technologies such as WhatsApp has promising potential. Deeper reflection on this process of socially embedded access to such technologies can be instrumental in informing policies in ICT4Ag.

Paper long abstract:

Studying the digital divide from a service-centric perspective that highlights the level of basic services availed by the farming community helps to understand the role of internet-enabled mobile ICTs in their empowerment, with economic and non-economic implications. People consider cultural, social, and economic aspects when reflecting on the lives they value and that these are critical motivators for individuals’ internet use. In a rural context, farmers are spatially connected and face similar environmental and economic conditions. Given this context, this paper explores how mobile technologies are unfolding and how farmers choose to use the internet-enabled mobile ICTs, provided they know the affordances (possible uses), particularly for farming purposes. For this, we take an ensemble view of mobile ICTs beyond an assemblage of hardware as alliances, networks, and interdependence among the people within the social and contextual aspects of farming. To operationalize the ensemble view, we introduce the concept of an ICT ecosystem which can be understood as a set of interdependent actors that provide technologies, network, facilitate information and knowledge exchange, and use all these services. This research is based in the Haryana state of India and follows a qualitative study design. In-depth qualitative interviews & FGDs of different actors within this ecosystem were conducted. They are farmers, agricultural scientists, agricultural extension officials, private sector actors such as the input sellers, middlemen at the produce market, and people at the agri-tech company providing farming assistance to farmers through ICTs and IoT technologies. The data is being analyzed in ATLAS.ti software.