Digital Farming: Making Agriculture Sustainable, Profitable and Attractive for Indian Youth

The greatest need in the agricultural sector today is to communicate targeted and timely information to farmers based on their needs. This has necessitated the integration of digital technologies into agricultural extension programs for accurate, better, faster and cheaper transfer of technology (TOT) from lab to land. The objective of this research paper is to explore the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Smartphone, Apps as a means of digital communication in knowledge sharing, market integration, targeted recommendations, getting financial help easily, helping stakeholders in making agriculture profitable sustainable enterprise thereby attracting farmers and especially the youth of India towards agriculture as a profession. Using Case Study, Survey and Interview methods this research paper examines the extent of penetration of agricultural apps and podcasts in the farmer community and its benefits, merits and demerits at the user's end. It also investigates the challenges involved in digital rural communication for development, training the farmers in the use of digital technology and their behaviour change. The findings are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis for which both secondary and primary data has been used