Agricultural Mobile Apps used in India: Current Status and Gap Analysis

Agriculture in India is growing with the introduction of the green revolution, white revolution, golden revolution and horticulture revolutions. Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support the transmission of localized information and services for making farming socially, economically and environmentally sustainable, comprises under the ‘Digital Agriculture’. This digital change is acting as a tipping point for Indian agricultural system (KrishiJagran, 2019; Panda et al., 2019). Presently, farmers are receiving diverse facts or information about farming from various resources which are distributed on many different locations according to its origin, its processors, producers or vendors (Bentley et al., 2019) as shown in Fig 1.
 

 
Agricultural traceability can be described as the collection of data, its documentation, maintenance and application of information related to all processes in an aspect that provides guarantee to the end user and other stakeholders on the origin, location and life history of a product. In the last few years, demand for traceability in agriculture has been considerably expanded and due to this technological innovation are needed (Opara, 2003). Here, we present an overview of a number of mobile apps available for traceability in agricultural sectors, discusses their features, functions and how they are lacking in some domains.
 
An overview of the agriculture mobile applications
 
Mobile phone services for farmers comprise text message services, helplines and apps (Down to Earth, 2019). Mobile apps are helping to boost overall business performance and reducing negative environmental impacts of farming (Barh and Balakrishnan, 2018; Krishi Jagran, 2019; Vennila et al., 2018). The main advantages of mobile apps for farmers are that they give timely information in response to the farmer’s specific needs. Farmers can interact and get guidance from agriculture experts across the country via apps (Bhaskar et al., 2017). Different mobile apps are used globally as Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KARLO) launches 14 mobile apps to transform agriculture (FAO, 2019). Few of them are M-farm, iCow, MAMA, Olalashe, MedAfrica, M-Pesa etc. (JKUAT, 2019). 

The present systematic research review was conducted at Patanjali Research Institute, Haridwar, India in 2019, according to the guidelines for Transparent Reporting of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (Moher et al., 2009). In this research review, specialized databases Google play store, App store, Food tank, Food quality and safety, IVRI and Predictive analytic today were used for the literature search in August and September 2019, using terms “mobile apps, agriculture mobile app, farm management app, fisheries app, livestock app, animal husbandry app as well as portal”. The following inclusion criteria were applied with proper information, good review as well as related our agriculture field. The studies identified by the searches were combined and duplicates, not belong in our fields, insufficient data and not proper review were excluded (Fig 2).
 

Here we examined about 73 agriculture mobile apps, used in different agriculture allied sectors. It is found that out of these 73 apps, there are about 14% of apps avail for pure agriculture, while 12% for farm management including geo-tagging. In fisheries and poultry sectors 14% app are used for each, moreover, 23% apps used for livestock and animal husbandry field as well as 23% apps are found to be applicable for food traceability sector (Fig 3). However, in India, different mobile apps are available to help in sustainable agriculture development, but their practice is still limited.
 

 
Agriculture apps generally used in India
 
Different mobile apps are installed and popularly used, in India related to farming sector. Some of them are Kisan suvidha, Pusa krishi, Crop insurance, Agri market, IFFCO kisan, Khetibadi, Organic farming, Farm-o-pedia, mKisan etc. (Agrovistaprofits, 2019; ICAR, 2017; KrishiJagran, 2019). Review of the apps available for agriculture sector mainly focused on soil testing ability along with some other application detailed in (Table 1). Moreover, in India, number of apps are widely used by farmers but they vary in number of users (Fig 4).
 

 

 
Mobile apps used for farm management on the basis of geo-tagging
 
Geo-tagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata (Finjanmobile, 2019). Some of the mobile apps used for geo-tagging, are mention in (Table 2).
 

 
Importance of mobile application in fisheries
 
Mobile applications give valuable angling tools such as solunar, tidal charts, advanced weather reporting, including radar maps, forecast and incident reporting, GPS advanced tracking, sea depth and potential fishing zones, etc. (Table 3). All the essential characteristics are grouped into one as a unique mobile application helpful for fishermen. Fishing mobile apps strive to fill the gap between data deficiency and effective fisheries management (Amrita and Karthickumar, 2016). 
 

 
Trends of mobile application when applied to poultry, livestock and animal husbandry sectors
 
Particularly, mobile is used to spread timely information regarding livestock diseases, exotic and indigenous breeds, livestock rearing and government schemes on animal husbandry (Belaker et al., 2017). Detailed information of livestock, poultry and animal husbandry apps are given in (Table 4).
 

 
Apps related to food traceability
 
Now mobile apps are being used as professional tools in a number of businesses, including the food industry (Food Quality and Safety, 2019). Food crisis have been with human beings in the past few years and lead to economic loss because of indirect costs of product recall. Therefore, much attention has given to food traceability in food supply chain. In order to satisfy the customer’s demand for variety of the food attributes and comply with the government rules, food companies have to implement traceability systems (Zhang and Zou, 2017). List of apps applied for food traceability system with their gap analysis are given in (Table 5).
 

 
Most utilized E-portal of agriculture in India
 
Farmers’ portal
 
This portal is an effort to create one stop shop for assemblage all informational needs relating to agriculture, fisheries, animal husbandry and sectors production of an Indian farmer. Here, a farmer gets all relevant information on specific subjects around his village/block/district or state (Fig 5). The portal gives information of package of practice with crop name, NARP zone and also provides the farmer friendly activities as booklets (1487 books), videos (903), best practice video and handbooks. As the data showed in 2002 most of the states of India are affected by drought (383), while in 2016 only 36 states are affected. Portal provides soil fertility map includes 19 states. It also provides information related to soil health card and numbers of soil testing labs around for example, 3887 total labs in 35 states (Farmers’ portal, 2019).    
 

 
Gap analysis of Farmers’ portal
 

• In input details of seeds, no any variety name is filled by dealer.
• In providing IPM package, portal includes only 92 crops till now.
• Soil preparation video are blocked and not opened for farmers.
• There is an error in the find machine option of the portal.
• Some error also finds in the manufacture and dealer details of machine.
• In most of the state’s crop POP (Package of Practices) not available.
• In POP, language option is only Hindi.
• Not avail the complete information of storage either cold storage or any others.

 
mKisan portal
 
mKisan SMS portal for farmers enables all Central and State government organizations in agriculture and allied sectors to give information/services/advisories to farmers by SMS in their language (Fig 6). It was inaugurated by the Hon’ble President of India Mr. Pranab Mukherjee on July 16, 2013. Around 20 web based services as Kisan call centre, agromet advisories, buyer seller interface and dealer market prices, NeGP-A roll-out etc. across the country are integrated with this SMS portal and many more are in the queue (mKisan, 2019).
 


Gap analysis of mKisan portal
 

• It is difficult to add or remove the farmers list along with detail of crop.
• The database is managed at DAC, New Delhi, the service provider doesn’t have right to delete the beneficiary farmer, instead it is being informed over phone/e-mail to the head quarter for elimination.
• In addition, keeping the static database of officials and farmers, advisories are pushed without the prior knowledge of need assessment and also lacks in two-way communication.
• More efforts need to be taken on providing IVRS based solutions, dynamic database of adding the farmer’s name, crop details, change of mobile numbers and advisory needs also.
• Data Central for DACNET projects and now for NeGP-A is being used for providing these service. No additional hardware/software tool have been procured especially for this project.

 
Apps data sharing
 
The USDA’s agricultural research service (ARS) recently released the first two of a suite of mobile phone apps known as ‘LandInfo’ and ‘LandCover’. These apps connect agricultural producers around the world and provide them with shared knowledge to increase their land’s productivity while protecting its resources for future generations (Sourcetrace, 2019).
 
Proposed mechanism of traceability
 
Traceability is a key pillar in providing a perception of safety for sustainable agriculture. Implementation of effective traceability systems improves the ability to implement verifiable safety and quality compliance programs. Effective traceability systems significantly reduce response times by providing more rapid access to relevant and reliable information that helps determine the source and location of implicated products. Thus, information at any point in the chain from farmer to consumer has become crucial. Traceability systems applied correctly, with supporting ICTs, enables agri-businesses to monitor and defend against risk in real time (International Trade Centre, 2015). So here, we proposed mechanism of traceability which includes following key points (Fig 7).
 

1. Government departments interlinked by this proposed mechanism.
2. The subsidy, loans and other benefits which are provided by government will go directly to the consumers in a transparent way.
3. This mechanism will make a strong check on food adulteration, wastage and spoilage.
4. It improves the soil fertility by promoting organic agriculture.
5. A strong check on corruption and middle man will be made by the proposed mechanism, so that benefits directly transfer to the genuine person.

Overarching benefits of ICT in agriculture includes that it can bring about product traceability along with disease and pest tracking. However, mobile apps are working as a boon for farmers and transforming agriculture but still they have some gaps which should be checked and removed. Either farmers unaware about the app or they have very limited users, because most of them are not user friendly. Only few apps work at the ground level. Even soil testing apps are not taking all the information from the fields of farmer and it was found that fertilizer information given but not according to soil testing. These are based on the data of soil type which is already given for India. Limited geo-tagging and geo-fencing are available in these apps and most importantly majority of these apps lack traceability mechanism. None of them provide information from crop to consumer and vice-versa. Proposed traceability mechanism is a novel approach which provides local language support, all types of fertilizer recommendation, satellite imagery based data, organic certification, tracking of Mandi rates, cloud based solution, soil moisture analysis, seed variety selection, geo-mapping and estimation of crop yield. 

The authors are thankful to revered Swami Ramdev ji for his continuous motivational support for the research work. We are also thankful to Sh. Narendra Tomar Ji, Agriculture minister of India for his encouragement. We also appreciate the efforts and support provided by Mr. Sanjay Aggrawal Ji, Secretary, DAC&FW. The support provided by Mr. PK Saha ji is also gratefully acknowledged.