Intervention(s)
We propose to study the impact of a farm financial management tool implemented by People’s Action for National Integration (PANI) -- a social development organisation working in underdeveloped regions of Uttar Pradesh. PANI developed a mobile application which enables farmers to record and review their expenses and income over the agricultural season. Downloaded on the mobile phone of farmers, the application requests farmers to record their expenses (specific to practices along the growing season including preparing land, seed and sowing, soil health, plant growth, pesticide, irrigation, and harvesting), as well as their harvest value (including both quantity, verified through a crop cutting exercise on a square meter of cultivated land, and price received if the crop is sold). This information is reviewed monthly allowing farmers to update their records on a regular basis.
PANI plans to extend their programme across Eastern Uttar Pradesh in late 2024. We propose to leverage this new role-out to investigate the impact of farm financial management for farmers using the platform. Using a randomised control trial, our experiment will randomly allocate farmers to either receive the app or not. In the first agricultural season, farmers having been selected to receive the app will be visited on a monthly basis by PANI community workers to encourage them to update their financial records on the platform. This data will be used to calculate crop-wise the total costs, value of harvest, and returns to investment -- broadly termed as financial summary. At the end of the season, PANI community workers will visit the farmers to explain their customised financial summary.
While keeping track of expenses and having a better understanding of the farm business may prove critical for making important production choices, seeing this information benchmarked to other farmers in the area may also be valuable. Preliminary evidence from PANIs trial using their digital platform suggests that there may be valuable information to share on farmer practices. We therefore propose to include a separate intervention arm wherein farmers will receive the financial management platform as explained above, with the additional feature of having this summary benchmarked to the top 25% of producers.
This project will employ empirical methods for robust causal inference on the behaviour of agricultural market participants to further our understanding of barriers to economic growth within the sector and consequently highlight potential paths to reducing income/wealth disparities.