Journal Press India^®

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Information is the elemental necessity for making any kind of decisions across industries. Decision making becomes more effective with the availability of required and apt information. Information availability not only upgrades the knowledge but also increases productivity by aiding effective decision making. Resembling the importance of information across different industries, information plays a paramount role in agricultural industry too. To make the information more easier to access and understandable by the farmers, ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has taken a step ahead to come out with agro-based mobile applications to facilitate farmers with required, scientific and reliable information to ease their decision making process and make it more effective and contributory to increase productivity and even reduce the harm caused by excess use of chemicals on the environment and human health too. In this paper, a broad literary review is made to understand the features available in the agro-based mobile applications and a three phased survey is made on the android applications store (Play store) to find out the diverse range of features embraced by the agro-based mobile applications acting in India.This paper helps the aspiring users and users of such applications to understand the features in detail which will help them tomake optimum utilization of the applications, the entrepreneurs in this domain can get an insight about the features that are most commonly adopted by the agro-apps in India andthis paper adds to the knowledge of role of ICT in information dissemination to the farmers, scientific agriculture and sustainable development.

Keywords

ICT in Agriculture; Agro-based Mobile Apps; Scientific Agriculture; Agroapps Survey; Features of Agri apps; Sustainable development

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