Can end‐user feedback inform ‘Responsibilisation’ of India's policy landscape for agri‐digital transition?*

Abstract

Agrarian transformations are imagined globally through digital agriculture. Most ambitious agrarian plans in India also identify the application of digital technologies to drive the next agro‐food revolution. However, the concerns around the ‘soft impacts’ of the agri‐digital transition, including socioethical concerns and farmers’ perceptions, have received relatively little attention among innovators and policymakers. Thus, through a combination of qualitative content analysis and topic modelling, this article studies end‐user feedback on smart farming apps in India. Emerging themes from the feedback analysis inform an understanding of the attributes of responsibilisation in policies through which agri‐digitalisation is being planned and introduced. The main findings indicate that agri‐digital innovations need to be inclusive of nonhegemonic vernaculars, responsive to farmers’ data privacy and ownership considerations and focus on producing simple, actionable insights for farmers instead of bombarding them with conflicting ideas. At the policy level, this article argues that the Indian policy landscape needs to be reformed substantially. This further suggests that India may need a new institutional architecture to manage the digital transition in agriculture.

A call to expand disciplinary boundaries so that social scientific imagination and practice are central to quests for ‘responsible’ digital agri‐food innovation

“…They note, supporting the findings of many of the articles in this SI, that 'responsiveness demands outlining the scope of sociocultural issues, infrastructural limitations, and problems in agricultural production systems that a digital agriculture technology may address or cause', which they found lacking when compared to 'much optimism about the transformative capacity of digital technology'. Kumar and Basu (2022) assess the state of India's policy landscape in the context of the agri-digital transition. They suggest that such a transition needs to involve a rethinking of traditional institutional architecture.…”

Use of information communication technologies by cricket farmers

“…Information is one key input in agriculture as it equips farmers to tap from opportunities that would improve their productivity. The agricultural transformation agenda will not be achieved if farmers have no reliable and timely information that will help them make informed decisions on production (Kumar and Basu, 2022).…”