Assessment of Mobile Voice Agricultural Messages Given to Farmers of Cauvery Delta Zone of Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

The study describes the assessment of mobile phone based agricultural voice messages disseminated to farmers of Cauvery delta zone in Tamil Nadu, India, during September, 2012 to June, 2013. The present study was conducted in July, 2013 for about 20 days period through telephonic interview using a well structured questionnaire with randomly selected 200 farmers across five districts (Thanjavur, Nagapattinam, Thiruchirapalli, Thiruvarur and Cuddalore of Cauvery delta zone in Tamil Nadu, India). The survey results showed that majority of the farmers have adopted the agricultural information disseminated through their mobile phone. In addition, Chi square analysis showed that the farmers with irrespective of socio economic characteristics such as gender, age, education, land holding and farming experience have adopted the agricultural information. More than half of the farmers had expressed that either all or most of the agricultural information were useful. Majority of them had expressed the information received on their mobile phone were trust worthy. With reference to satisfaction level of farmers, almost all the farmers were very satisfied with audio quality, simplicity of language and contents of voice messages. Majority of the farmers’ have indicated that the mobile voice messages were of better as compared to other sources of information that they were accessing.