Wise and Otherwise — A journey to understand Indian farmers
W e are in the 21st century and guess which sector is the highest employment sector in India? I.T?… Hold on my friend!
The oldest industry in the history of mankind still dominates by employing 50% of the workforce of the country and contributing 18% to the national GDP. Yes, you guessed it right — The agricultural sector.
Now imagine designing a product for 50% of the workforce of the country, Exciting? Stressed? Having a rollercoaster of feelings? Aha, it is indeed a rollercoaster ride! Tight your seatbelts. We are getting started.
The Inception
We were discussing the pricing for our new device and my teammate said “Farmers can easily afford a device for Rs. 8,000”. I replied NO WAY! They hardly save anything and it’s too costly for them.
There was silence and I realized DAMN! I am looking at India from just one perspective.
I am from Kutch, Gujarat. People in Kutch struggles with water hence farming is quite a difficult profession while the teammate is from Saurashtra, Gujarat and they have an abundance of water, and farming is a wealthy profession for them. Same state and 2 completely different perspectives!
The People at Carnot Tech Team are from all over India which brings in a lot of perspectives though the flip side is that everyone has a user persona in their mind.
Hence it was essential to create a user persona so that we all have a common denominator.
Wait! What is USER PERSONA?
A user persona is a user profile created to represent different types of users that use a company’s product or service.
The Planning
There was no template about the Indian farmers on the internet and we being leaders in the Agri-tech industry decided to build one from scratch.
We drafted 80 interview questions. They were a combination of open and close-ended questions related to a farmer’s lifestyle and our products.
The end goal was to understand how much a farmer’s lifestyle is digitally integrated and which parts of the work are still traditionally done and the reasons behind those decisions.
We shortlisted 16 states and targeted 5 users from each state summing up to 80 users from all over India.
The Execution
These interviews were remote and we were ambitious! Farmers started hanging up calls while we were asking questions; they were not being rude. Who got time to answer 80 questions to a stranger?
Lessons learned! We reduce the number of questions to 25–30 and created a framework via which farmers started trusting us and the conversations use to last for hours and we had to ask them to hang up.
As these interviews were unplanned for farmers, timings use to be random starting in the morning 6 at some time to 9 at the night.
It was feeling like we were traveling all over India as with every call we were hearing a new accent or language. Though the language also became a barrier in the south part of the country and we had to drop 4 states (20 users).
The Learnings
The following data is a combination of qualitative data which we collected doing user interviews and quantitative data from our IoT devices and mobile apps.
If you see the above list most of these or at least a few of them are used by every smartphone owner. Internet is blurring the line between cities & villages. Indian apps like Sharechat are gaining a strong share in the interiors of India.
Almost every smartphone user in India is using the internet. Credit goes to Jio
🛒 Online shopping is gaining popularity in the interiors of India as often the delivery is free and these apps offer lucrative discount deals. Cash on delivery is the preferred mode of payment as they still don’t fully trust these platforms.
💰 Farmers often look for loans from banks and government bodies. Schemes like KCC had gained a lot of popularity in the Northern states of India.
Noticeably Farmers are not comfortable with documentation and the long approval process of banks & government bodies hence unorganized lenders come into the picture.
💸 In daily life the farming community prefers doing transactions in cash hence apps like Phone Pe, GPay is used for minimal purposes like payment of Electricity bill and sometimes cell phone network recharges.
🏛 Government keeps launching subsidies, relief funds, and other schemes for farmers but these schemes hardly reach farmers. Either farmers don’t have the necessary documents or by the time they are aware of these schemes are already expired.
CORRUPTION ALERT!!! Yes, there are a few agents who will make sure the farmer get these schemes but they will charge a commission in return 🤑
🎮 We thought farmers will be killing their time playing games like Ludo though to our surprise they don’t. In fact, they hardly play any game. They watch movies or YouTube videos to kill their time.
Though the younger generation of farmers is active and they do play mobile games.
🐛 Local pest shops are the go-to place for any crop-related issue. Some of the farmers do look up solutions on the internet but the results are often non-satisfactory and the pesticide shown as the solution is not available locally.
They share a connection with the local Pest shopkeepers as they have been doing business with them for years and in few cases, they even get pesticides and fertilizers on credit which makes this bond stronger.
🎁BONUS!
- We google solutions but farmers YouTube solutions and they prefer voice over typing.
- YouTube ads will get you more downloads than Facebook. As farmers love video content over other types of content.
- Farmers have various WhatsApp groups from weather alerts to farming tips and circulating your app in these groups will also get you downloads.
Here is a glimpse of our user persona
We were amazed to see the results from these interviews and learned a lot about the Indian farmers. Once we shared these personas within our team it was loved by all the teams and they all started thinking about how these can help to make better product decisions.
Of course, we are going to iterate these user personas further as we learn from our users.
Got any questions? Drop me a mail at hiten.rajgor@carnot.co.in and I will be happy to discuss.
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