Sustainability of the Rural ICT Project: a Case Study of aAQUA e-Agriservice, Maharashtra, India

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are continuously emerging as key tools to support development activities undertaken by Governments, civil society and private enterprises. It has been showing significant result in addressing information asymmetry gap in many sectors and localities, especially in agriculture & allied sector. The rural people, specifically farming communities have been getting timely & relevant information, services & support, and farming inputs. However, the sustainability of these ICT based efforts in improving well-being of farming communities is key to the effectiveness of a rural ICT projects in India. The present paper aimed to determine the sustainability of the aAQUA (Almost All Questions Answered) e-Agriservice in Maharashtra state, western parts of India covering the four districts of the state. The study used the ex-post facto (cause to effect) research design in a quasi-intervention setting. The list of registered users was obtained from the service provider (presently Agrocom Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) and total of 120 users were selected randomly from four districts (30 users from each district). The sustainable-Agriservice Index (SeAGRSI) was computed based on the five dimensions viz. technological, economic, social, institutional, and political by using Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA), Mixed Method Approach and Normalized Rank Order Method (NROM). The study revealed that the SeAGRSI for the social indicators was the highest among other dimensions of the sustainability (SeAGRSI = 0.77) followed by the technologically (0.73), economic (0.71) political (0.62) and institutional (0.58) sustainable. It was also found that the mean SeAGRSI was 0.70 as reported by one third (32.50%) of the users, which means 70 per cent the aAQUA e-Agriservice was technologically, socially, economically, institutionally and politically sustainable.