Impact Evaluation of Ama Krushi

PxD operates Ama Krushi, a free agriculture information service delivered over mobile phones, in collaboration with the State Government of Odisha Department of Agriculture using a two-way IVR platform with "outbound" push calls and an "inbound" hotline service.

We evaluate at scale the impact of a digital agricultural advisory service reaching millions of smallholder farmers, in an eastern state of India. We randomized the rollout of the service among 13,675 rice farmers within five districts, and measured the impact on agricultural outcomes using both survey and remote sensing data. Using survey data, we find that access to the digital service leads to significant improvements in farmers’ knowledge and adoption of recommended practices, a modest increase in rice yield and harvest, and a large reduction in the likelihood of rice crop loss on average. Further analyses suggest that the treatment impact is concentrated in areas hit by certain types of weather shocks, increasing harvest by up to 9% and reducing severe crop loss by up to 21% in affected areas. We use vegetation indices (VIs) to construct an objective yield measure for all farmers in the study sample and confirm that our key survey results are robust against differential attrition, reporting biases, and survey sample selection. While the VI-predicted yield provides valuable validation of survey results, our analysis highlights the need for methodological improvements in the effective application of remote sensing data to measure program impacts on agricultural outcomes.view more