Diffusion of Old Information and Communication Technologies in Disseminating Agricultural Knowledge: An Analysis of Farmers’ Income

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of old information and communication technologies (ICTs) in knowledge dissemination and the economic outcome of ICT use by farmers. Based on the National Sample Survey data, the paper examines two issues – the role of ICTs in disseminating agricultural knowledge and whether there is any significant difference between the ICT adopters and non-adopters in terms of their net revenue. Following the theoretical argument by Rogers and Shoemaker and Brown, we hypothesize that the use of ICTs makes a significant difference between the adopters and non-adopters. We estimated our hypothesis through ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, where the outcome variable ‘net revenue per acre’ is regressed on the explanatory variable ‘ICT use’. As, the revenue of a farmer is cofounded with other effects other than ICT use, we have controlled ICT use by other variables. The estimated result shows that there is a significant difference between adopters of ICT and non-adopters in terms of their net revenue. The result shows that there is not any significant difference between the adopters and non-adopters of institutional sources. If farmers are using individual sources then the non-adopters have higher returns than the adopters.