July 8, 2009
India’s Agricultural Revolution Goes Mobile with Mandi Bhav
With the advent of truly multi-media phones such as the Blackberry and the iPhone, the mobile handset has become a platform for anything from music to productivity. However, the power of mobile can go beyond entertainment and business, as the recent upheavals in Iran have demonstrated. The cell phone’s increasing affordability and ubiquity have allowed it to become an effective tool for socio-economic change. This is especially true in developing countries where, due to poor internet and landline penetration, the mobile is the primary means of communication.
Mobile is empowering just such an upheaval in rural India, home to its agricultural labor force, mostly small-scale farmers. India is a net exporter of various food grains, able to support its people and sell its excess to other nations. Despite this productivity, its farmers have remained poor, earning an average 40% less than India’s 2008 GDP per capita of $1016. Primary producers have traditionally been on the short end of the stick in this country, forced to accept the prices dictated by purchasing agents at government-mandated marketplaces (or ‘mandi’). With little or no knowledge of prices at other ‘mandi’, farmers have no leverage to negotiate better prices.
A web-based initiative called the e-Choupal, introduced in 2000, brought about significant changes in the system. Internet terminals were established in various villages that let farmers check the current market prices for their goods, resulting in greater negotiating power with purchasing agents. Currently, over 4 million farmers access 6,450 e-Choupal kiosks in rural India.
A new initiative launched early this year by mobile carriers BSNL, Tata Teleservices and developer Impetus Technologies is seeking to do even better than the e-Choupal project. For a nominal subscription fee of 30 rupees a month (60 US cents), farmers can use this commodity price sharing application, called ‘Mandi Bhav’, to access spot prices in real time via WAP, SMS or download for 500 kinds of goods being sold at all 3,000 Mandis throughout India. The affordable subscription fee (mobile games go for 50 to 90 rupees a pop in India), paired with mass-market phones like the Nokia 1100 (brand new, $25) and the high incidence of ‘phone sharing’, make the ‘Mandi Bhav’ mobile application a potentially more effective way to empower India’s farmers than the e-Choupal network. With the support of India’s largest carriers and the execution of a rural marketing strategy to reach a potential market of 120 million farmers and 8 million purchasing agents, ‘Mandi Bhav’ can be a game-changer for India’s agricultural sector and can help instigate a real mobile revolution.
- David Zarraga
