|
Makale Özeti:
|
The continuous rise in the number of suicides among Indian rural based farmers is
not solely due to lack of funds or failure of crops or huge amount of interests on
debts. Many a time the farmers are in daze triggered by the panic and fear both of
which are due to lack of information backed by appropriate technologies. Lack of
information about the appropriate crop patterns the farmers should choose
depending on the market demands and remunerative prices, availability of water,
supply of seeds for sowing, proper knowledge of the use of manures and ways to
avoid over use of pesticides--did contribute to the ever increasing number of suicides
in the regions of Vidharbha and Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The
Government machinery comprising Agricultural extension officers, backed by the
Agricultural programs on Radio and TV could hardly meet the information required
for these farmers affected with the compounding problems. Use of convergent mobile
technologies with the internet and e-mail facilities is the need of the hour. The latest
data drawn from the IMRB survey (The I-Cube 2007) indicated that internet usage in
India has grown by more than 11 times over the last seven years.
The internet expansion is seen moving down from the metros to towns with
population less than half a million with the number of users up by 69 times since
2007. In the last two years, 2005 and 2006, on an average 4.5 million new mobile
subscribers were added every month.
Convergent mobile technologies with wide range of mobiles and packages being
available now hold the promise of offering basic literacy and numeracy skills
accessible to the small farmers in India, besides a lot of information concerning the
availability of loans at lower interest through banks and self-help groups, crop
patterns, remunerative prices for the produce, export norms for the crops, emarketing
and e-commerce, etc, The paper outlines a visualization of such an
optimistic design of use of convergent mobile technologies.
|