PhD

The present study “Agricultural information support service vis-à-vis Kisan Call Centre: A Performance auditing” was undertaken with the objective to conduct a performance audit of Kisan Call Centre (KCC) aimed at suggesting performance improvement of agricultural advisory services, to delineate, categorize and document the constraints and solutions in imparting agricultural advisory service through KCC and to develop an efficiency index that can be used for the further analysis of KCC. Besides the study also aimed to find out the awareness of farmers on KCC and its service, and the utilization and satisfaction derived out of the KCC, which would throw light on the performance/ lacunae in the KCC service with the reasons thereof to stream line the KCC for improved effectiveness.
There were two categories of respondents. One hundred and fifty farmers were selected from south, central and north zones of Kerala using random sampling for studying the awareness of farmers on KCC and 150 farmers were selected purposefully from the data base of KCC for studying the utilization of KCC. Total there were 300 respondents.
The strength of KCC was found to be its free sixteen hour seven days a week service provided by the dedicated staff. The weakness in the functioning of KCC included its lack of agricultural graduates at the time of study, lack of field experience by the staff and lack of knowledge on other areas apart from agriculture. The opportunities that KCC could make use were the new social media platforms like Whats App and video conferencing facility. The challenges faced by KCC were the low call rates, providing solutions without actually seeing the problem and sending the crop messages to those farmers who do not need them.
The benchmarking study to evaluate the performance of KCC revealed that KCC matched to the standards set by the International Finance Corporation (2010) except for the service level standard (where 80 per cent of calls needs to be answered
within 20 seconds) which was 30 seconds for KCC and agent attrition standard (measure of staff turnover annually should only be 15 per cent) which was 80 per cent.
The out-come oriented study that measured the satisfaction of the respondents showed that the respondents had fairly high level of satisfaction towards the KCC service.
Sixty nine percent of the respondents opined that KCC had medium level of efficiency. The Efficiency index was calculated with nine indices such as understandability, completeness, knowledge gain, accuracy, reliability, timeliness, practicality, flexibility and connectivity. Understandability was rated as the most efficient quality (78 per cent) with regard to the working of KCC and connectivity was the least efficient quality (62.17 per cent) of KCC.
The major constraint faced by the respondents was lack of connectivity of the calls and the least faced constraint by the respondents was the lack of mobile phone/ telephones. The call centre agent‟s constraints were the difficulty in understanding the local dialect, the names of the crops in different region and the difficulty to understand the queries when there was a connectivity problem. The constraints faced by the farmers as perceived by the agricultural officers were the illiteracy, the long wait to get connected to the call centre when the lines were busy and the lack of availability of suggested inputs in the nearby shops.
The suggestions to improve the working of KCC by the farmers includes to initiate a call back facility (83 per cent), to transfer the calls to the second tier through call conferencing (77 per cent), to suggest organic way of fighting pest and diseases (75 per cent), to provide information on the shops where the suggested inputs were available in their respective area (70 per cent), to open their service branches in each district (70 per cent), to provide quickest, easiest and practical solutions to solve the farm problems (65 per cent) and to continue the messages through mobile phones (63 per cent).
The agricultural officer‟s opinion to improve KCC services was to appoint Post graduates in agriculture who are having more knowledge in their respective field, to provide field level training to the call centre agents, to send Malayalam messages in a format that would be compatible in any type of mobile phones. A facility for sending the photos of pest and diseases by the farmers were also suggested by both agricultural officers and call centre agents for better agro advisory service.
Among the three states Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Karnataka received the maximum number of average calls (13854 calls) followed by Tamil Nadu (9632 calls) and Kerala (1219 calls). The average calls received were maximum during the month of November for Karnataka and Kerala and least during the month of May. Tamil Nadu received the maximum number of calls during the month of January and least during the month of September.
In the study the independent variables temporal awareness on KCC, satisfaction towards KCC, utilization of KCC, adoption of advices and peer group contact were found to have positive correlation and extension agency contact, experience in internet use, information source utilization and constraints were found to have negative correlation with the dependent variable efficiency of KCC.
The variables digital divide, temporal awareness on KCC, satisfaction and utilization of KCC were found to have positive correlation and constraint in using KCC was found to have negative correlation on the attitude of respondents towards KCC. Satisfaction was the variable that contributed maximum direct effect towards the efficiency as well as attitude towards KCC.
The study revealed that in order to increase the utilization of KCC by the farming community there requires a parallel mode of communication along with the increased advertisements through various mass medias, that is the extension personnel should encourage and pursue the farmers to utilize the service by convincing them the benefits of using the service.