Diagnosing Data from ICTs to Provide Focused Assistance in Agricultural Adoptions

In the last two decades, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have played a pivotal role in empowering rural populations in India by making knowledge more accessible. Digital Green is one such ICT that employs a participatory approach with smallholder farmers to produce instructional agricultural videos that encompass content specific to them. With the help of human mediators, they disseminate these videos to farmers using projectors to improve the adoption of agricultural practices. Digital Green's web-based data tracker (CoCo) stores the attendance and adoption logs of millions of farmers, the videos screened to them and their demographic information. In our work, we leverage this data for a period of ten years between 2010-2020 across five states in India where Digital Green is most active and use it to conduct a holistic evaluation of the ICT. First, we find disparities in the adoption rates of farmers, following which we use statistical tests to identify the different factors that lead to these disparities as well as gender-based inequalities. We find that farmers with higher adoption rates adopt videos of shorter duration and belong to smaller villages. Second, to provide assistance to farmers facing challenges, we model the adoption of practices from a video as a prediction problem and experiment with different model architectures. Our classifier achieves accuracies ranging from 79% to 90% across the five states, demonstrating its potential for assisting future ethnographic investigations. Third, we use SHAP values in conjunction with our model for explaining the impact of various network, content and demographic features on adoption. Our research finds that farmers greatly benefit from past adopters of a video from their group and village. We also discover that videos with a low content-specificity benefit some farmers more than others. Next, we highlight the implications of our findings by translating them into recommendations for providing focused assistance, community building, video screening, revisiting participatory approach and mitigating inequalities. Lastly, we conclude with a discussion on how our work can assist future investigations into the lived experiences of farmers.