Why should I bother to break the norm?: The Trend and Practices of Adopting Technology-Driven Solutions by Indian Shrimp Farmers

This article summarizes the paper “Why should I bother to break the norm?: Exploring the Prospects of Adopting Technology-Driven Solutions by Indian Shrimp Farmers” about the challenges and prospects of introducing technology-driven solutions for shrimp farmers in India. This paper will be presented at the 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, a top venue for social computing scholarship. It will also be published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM (PACM).

Individuals worldwide are accessing intelligent and more advanced technologies in many forms. Researchers in the CHI, CSCW, DIS, and visualization community have extensively analyzed many technology-driven applications regarding their usability, accessibility, and applicability for a wide range of user groups. Despite these massive efforts, many of these research studies primarily focused on North American and Western European populations, whereas global-south people often received limited attention. We addressed this concern in this paper, where we analyzed the challenges of adopting technologies in the global south in the context of rural Indian Shrimp Farmers.

Shrimp Farming in India:

Shrimp farming in Asian countries (such as China, Thailand, India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh) gained popularity in the 1980s. In the beginning, shrimp farming was considered a desired profession as it provided immediate economic benefits, poverty reduction, food security, and generated employment from seed collectors to exporters. India has become the world’s second-largest shrimp producer and the largest shrimp exporter in the USA. Shrimp farmers make 5–7 times more profit than crop farmers in India.

Despite these benefits, shrimp farming received criticism from various communities because of its effect on the environment and socio-economic condition of the neighboring communities. For instance, coastal shrimp farms in Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam became the primary source of mangrove destruction, water pollution, and land-quality degradation. In addition to environmental unsustainability, shrimp farming was also blamed for the grave socio-economic impacts, including traditional livelihood displacement, loss of land security, food insecurity, marginalization, rural unemployment, social unrest, political bullying, and conflicts.

Understanding the gravity of various challenges posed by shrimp farming, researchers proposed to introduce global guidelines for shrimp farming so that farmers can generate a reasonable and relatively stable net income/benefit on a long-term basis without degrading the environment.

For instance, to ensure the long-term sustainability of shrimp farming within existing communities, researchers proposed farm management, integrated coastal zone management, and regulatory mechanisms and policy instruments. Such initiatives perform best when local communities and governments get involved as regulators.

The efforts show the significance of identifying the opportunities and measures to make shrimp farming sustainable. However, not much work has been done from the perspective of shrimp farmers. 90% of farmed shrimp in India do not qualify the global standards and are rated as “Avoid”. The primary challenge of shrimp farming is the frequent occurrence of diseases and higher dependencies on several environmental factors that significantly impact the productivity and sustainability of this profession.

One possible remedy to many of these challenges is to use production technologies that can assist farmers in maintaining diseases below the acceptable threshold and help boost the industry. In shrimp farming, production technologies include but are not limited to a combination of hardware devices, sensors, software, smartphone-based application interfaces, and standalone smartphone-based applications. However, before the mass introduction and promotion of these technologies, it is critical to understand shrimp farmers’ opinions and mental models about adopting advanced solutions in their farms that can not only bring benefits for farmers but also can potentially make shrimp farming more sustainable for the environment. This paper aimed to investigate the perspectives of shrimp farmers about technologies and the challenges they face in adopting them on their farms.

We took an ethnographic approach to understand the general practices and common challenges of the shrimp farmers of Andhra Pradesh in India, the largest shrimp-producing state in India. Our work explores the existing perception of adopting new production technologies by shrimp farmers. We conducted an eight-month-long user study involving individual interviews and focus groups with 29 shrimp farmers.

Key Findings:

• We observed that shrimp farmers in India primarily follow a traditional approach to their farms. Large and medium-scale experienced farmers prefer to continue the same methods and products in their farms that worked for them in the past for many years. They often hesitate to try new technology-driven solutions because of the risk involved with those products. They value their family farming traditions and believe that following those tradition is critical to maintaining profitability in their profession.
• On the contrary, new, small-scale farmers are open to trying new technology-driven solutions. They prefer to take risks and believe that trying new technologies is critical to achieving the world standard in shrimp farming.

We identified several areas to help experienced farmers overcome mental barriers to adopting new technology-driven solutions.

Our Recommendations:

• The younger and older farmers can come together through a community-based WhatsApp group. The aquaculture office (operated by the state government) may create the group initially and ask local farmers to join the group. Such a group can also be helpful for the state authority during an emergency (such as a sudden outbreak of bacterial infection) to inform farmers to take precautions against the disease. Most importantly, a virtual network like this can provide a platform for sharing information among farmers of all experience levels.
• To build the trust for latest production technologies, these products can be introduced by field technicians of food distributor companies who are more closely related to shrimp farmers. Typical gathering venues such as feed distributors’ offices and shops can be appropriate venues for discussing these production technologies as these places are more familiar to shrimp farmers than any new locations dedicated to new products.
• Distributors of new technologies may take positive initiatives by installing some devices for free in ponds of motivated farmers so that farmers with initial hesitation may get chances to observe the performance of these systems firsthand and thus can gain confidence for adopting those technologies in their farms. Distributors can also contribute by training unskilled human workforce to manage advanced production technologies, making it easier for larger farmers to adopt these technologies.

Overall, the impacts of our findings can be best understood by acknowledging the benefits of existing traditional and intuitive farming practices of Indian shrimp farmers that helped India become one of the top shrimp production hubs in the world.