Determinants of Digitised Farm Information Outreach in Aquaculture: A Case of Mobile Phone Application for Smallholder Fish Farmers in North East India

Under the neo-endogenous rural development outlook for social change in low- and low-middle-income countries (LMICs), digitised knowledge and information-sharing tools such as mobile-based agro-advisory systems (MBAS) emerged as long-awaited social innovations. A farmer-centric mobile phone-based aquaculture extension approach (named Matsya Varta) has been operated for smallholder fish farmers in Tripura, a northeastern state of India, from September 2019 to March 2023. The study explores the knowledge-information service outreach of digital transformation in aquaculture catered by MBAS (in this case, Matsya Varta), relating to the socio-technical perspectives of smallholder fish farmers in northeast India. Data were collected from 120 randomly selected smallholder fish farmers, registered under Matsya Varta from four districts of Tripura in a pre-tested interview schedule and analysed using appropriate statistical tools. The study found synchronous access, acquisition, and utilisation of knowledge and information from MBAS in conformity with the needs for information of the farming communities, which ensures the success of neo-endogenous rural development initiatives like MBAS. The study recommends careful consideration of different socio-personally significant prognostic factors of end-users during customisation of the system architecture of MBAS to ensure the digital transformation process in fisheries and aquaculture domains for a more focused, purposeful, and effective knowledge outflow to the smallholder fish farmers in the LMICs.