Targeting 10 Crore Indian Farmers Using Their Mobile Phones

Modern research analysts believe that by 2025, India will experience a digital explosion and that half of the users of the mobile network will be from rural India. With recent transformations, the technology has turned cheaper and easily affordable by everyone irrespective of their income levels.

The difference among students, daily wagers, business class, working-class, or elites has been almost removed with the reasonably priced availability of mobile technology and low data rates. The best example in this scenario is Jio 4G services.

According to research, it is believed that there will be a rise of 1.4 billion in the number of mobile phone users in the year 2020. With these figures in mind, imagine how easy and low-cost the marketing activities of your services or products will turn using mobile marketing strategies.

What will be the future role of mobile technology and marketing in targeting 10 Crore Indian farmers?

There are around 10 crores of information hungry farmers across the states, districts, and villages.
Also, there are 40 lacs of rural specific customer base segregated in different states and districts of India. Consequently, the role of mobile phones, technology, and marketing further comes into the picture. Since technology and mobile phones are now available cheaply and are accessible in households, it has eased the marketing initiatives.

Technology has advanced to a high level, and farmers have the option of asking their queries, getting weather updates, getting the economic outlook of their crops and how they are going to perform in the market by the click of a button.

The communities of farmers need technical innovations and easy communication modes across the country. Earlier, when everything was done manually, no one thought that they could sit in their homes and control the functioning and flow of electricity to their tube-well or pump. But here we are technologically advanced and research-backed controlling all the stuff with the click of a button.

These technologies are developed to make the valuable lives of our farmers better by predicting real-time scenarios and market performances. However, these are just some initiatives, and farmers across India need more such innovative stuff.

Marketing initiatives that got flourishing and helped Indian farmers through mobile phones

Farmers are the spine of the economy in India, and they need to be assisted for the swift growth of the country. Many initiatives have come forward to help Indian farmers and apps which are transforming Rural India include:

• IFFCO-KISAN

The Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative Limited or IFFCO is a multi-state cooperative society in India that has an outreach of 55 million farmers. It provides a mass brand promotion to select a target audience, interactive voice response, MMS, voice messages, push notifications, and miss call alert services. These services are available in vernacular languages, which make the promotional campaigns easily understandable and increase their reachability.

• Kisan Suvidha

Kisan Suvidha offers a unique interface for farmers and agricultural stakeholders who enable consistent updates on weather, market prices, correct selection of fertilizers, precise pesticides, and other such information that is necessary for farmers. It also allows farmers to avail insights on plant protection and recommendations from government officials.

• Kisan Space

It helps farmers in addressing the grievances of farmers associated with weather, market prices, business dealers, advisories, crop protection, and product promotions.  Herein, farmers can also post free advertisements for buying and selling products. Even the buyers can directly connect with farmers for their specific requirements.

• Plantix

Plantix is a mobile app that offers crop-related suggestions for farmers and gardeners. By clicking a simple picture, one can spot the category of plant, as well as diagnose the emergence of a possible disease, pest, or nutrient deficiencies. It enables online communities for farmers, whereby they can discuss the plant health problems and have access to local weather reports.

• Agri Media Video

This is a video-based mobile app built for farmers to provide them easy access to an online marketplace by bringing the agriculture inputs and outputs, farming retail, and helpful fulfillment service on a single online platform. It offers expert chat service wherein; farmers can resolve their queries along with the selection of uploading images of unhygienic crops and discuss their treatments.

• Agro star

Agrostar is India’s foremost AgTech start-up, which helps farmers with agricultural solutions. They use all-embracing data, technology, and agronomy facts to give precise solutions to Indian farmers.

• BigHaat

It is an extensive agriculture platform, which empowers the farmers with high-quality agriculture inputs and accessories. It further connects buyers with the suppliers for pre & post-sale enablement with comprehensive user experience.

• Marketyard

 This app helps the farmers to BUY, SELL & RENT “Everything” related to agriculture. They work on a comprehensive and common platform that eliminates the role of agents. They connect skilled entrepreneurs and angel investor networks by virtually enabling investment relationships, right from initial pitch to thriving exit.

• MyAgriGuru

MyAgriGuru is an integrated digital platform for farmers that enable communication in bilingual languages on improved and innovative farming for enhancing their incomes.

• Dimagi Software Innovations

This app has accelerated the efforts of ASHA workers and helped in their work to reduce maternal and newborn deaths in the villages. It allows workers to record the data and provide multimedia-enhanced counseling messages in a more resourceful way. The performance of the ASHA workers can also be tracked efficiently through this tool. Around 1.39 million pregnant women and children have benefited from this app.

Initiatives that used modern information and mobile technology to communicate with farmers

NESARA is another such initiative that uses modern information technology to converse with the farmers and take care of them. The application advises the farmers about agronomy or the science of a holistic perspective. They use cell phones to send the farmers alerts about the weather and stages of the agricultural cycle.

NESARA also provides debt counseling to the farmers opting for loans. They make sure that the farmers know the market rate of interest and that they know the pros and cons of taking a particular loan or investment. This scenario helps the farmers escape the cycle of debts that they fall into usually.

Nano Ganesh is another such technology that can monitor electricity control, which has been developed by Ossian Agro Automation, Pune, India. Using this technology, the farmers can control the electricity flowing to the pump. They can easily turn it on and off with the use of a touch-screen.

All these modernized technologies, advanced software solutions, and applications are helping the farmers grow more and more, and we hope for a better future for Indian farmers.

Key Takeaways

More than 50% of the population using mobile phones will be the Indian rural population, and these mobile phones will be the most accessible mode to communicate with them in the coming time.

So, mobile technology is the go-to approach for the success of your marketing campaigns, which helps you to attain your target audiences efficiently. Also, mobile marketing has turned cost-effective and is probably the cheapest mode of interaction because of the low data rates and the high usage of mobile phones by the people in India.

The current statistics show that in the coming time more significant population using the mobile network will be the rural population, which means that if your target audience is a rural population, mobile networking will be the best option for you to communicate or advertise your products.

However, the economy and the market trends are dynamic and ever-changing, therefore are hard to track. So, you have to partner with the right rural marketing agency, which is specialized in strategizing rural campaigns in integration with mobile and digital mediums to help your products reaching out to the right people at the right and right place.