ABSTRACT
The Internet-based Farmers’ Welfare Scheme (IFWS) stressed the need for setting up an Internet-based IT support service to enable farmers to have a dynamic, two-way, value-added information exchange throughout the gamut of farm inputs and farming economics to remove all market imperfections so that the cost of farming can be reduced and to ensure that farmers earn the maximum price from the agricultural produce market. This multi-layered Internet-based support system will consist of agribusiness professionals with the best IT-enabled working infrastructure at the Panchayat level, the district level, the state level and finally the national level, each with different levels of information and coordination functions. The objective would be to provide value-added – that is, well-analysed, cut-and-dried – answers (information) and coordination to all the farming stakeholders (farmers, government agencies, related farm-input sectors, marketing support services and secondary and tertiary sector players related to the agricultural sector). Farmers have been deprived of a large chunk of their likely profits, which can be prevented, in part, by this kind of networking. The present IT-enabled support across different aspects of farming, under the Kisan Call Centres, use only basic features of information, communication technology (ICT), focusing on two-way data exchange. It is nowhere near making full use of the dynamic, interactive, Internet-based solutions using artificial intelligence and big data that would lead farmers to generation of wealth and welfare.
