Willingness-to-pay behaviour of farmers for the mobilebased extension services through Reuter's Market Light in Tamil Nadu

A venture promoted and supported by Thomson Reuters, Reuters Market Light (RML) offers highly customized and localized agricultural and related information service. Using a subscription economy model, RML provides information services via mobile phone-based short message service (SMS) primarily aimed at farmers. Based on the aforementioned facts and orientation the investigation was carried out in the Erode district of Tamil Nadu. The Tamil Nadu Reuters Market Light (RML) of Erode utilizes 14 Pallavan Grama Bank to distribute the messages which was purposely selected for the study. A proportional stratified random sampling was used to draw 180 respondents for the study. Majority of the respondents (86.7%) were willing to pay for accessing the RML service followed by 63.4 per cent who were willing to pay Rs 50–100, 23.3 per cent willing to pay Rs100200 whereas 13.3 per cent were not willing to pay to access the RML service. In probity function analysis five variables such as age, educational level, farm size, income and RML gratification were shown statistically significant to the willingness-to-pay behaviour of farmers.