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This study estimates the benefits that Indian farmers derive from market and weather information delivered to their mobile phones by a commercial service called Reuters Market Light (RML). We conduct a controlled randomized experiment in 100 villages of Maharashtra. Treated farmers associate RML information with a number of deci-sions they have made, and we find some evidence that treatment affected spatial arbi-trage and crop grading. But the magnitude of these effects is small. We find no statistically significant average effect of treatment on the price received by farmers, crop value-added, crop losses resulting from rainstorms, or the likelihood of changing crop varieties and cultivation practices. Although disappointing, these results are in line with the market take-up rate of the RML service in the study districts, which shows small numbers of clients in aggregate and a relative stagnation in take-up over the study period. JEL codes: O13, Q11, Q13. The purpose of this study is to ascertain whether agricultural information dis-tributed through mobile phones generates economic benefits to farmers. We im-plement a randomized controlled trial of a commercial service entitled Reuters Market Light (RML) offered by the largest and best-established private pro-vider of agricultural price information in India at the time of the experiment. Operating in Maharashtra and other Indian states, RML distributes price, weather, and crop advisory information through SMS messages. We offered a one-year free subscription to RML to a random sample of farmers to test whether they obtain higher prices for their agricultural output. Marcel Fafchamps is a professor at Oxford University, United Kingdom; his email address is marcel.
Fafchamps et al. (Sun,) studied this question.