Education and Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Rural India

In many developing countries, access to basic social services, such as education and health, is a major challenge for political decision-making like investment strategies. Thus, this article aims to analyze education impact on the adoption of new agricultural technologies in rural India. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2011-2012 (Desai and Vanneman, 2015) collected from 42,152 households across all states and union territories in India, we estimate these effects through chi-square test and binary logistics model. The results of the estimates show that when a farmer is educated, the likelihood of adopting a new farm technology increases by 3.37 %. But the effect of education is still heterogeneous. Indeed, when the farmer lives in a rural area, the probability of adopting new technology is 3.30 % but if he is not poor this probability is 3.61 %. The results also show that if the farmer is educated and lives in an urban area, the probability of adopting new technology is 6.12 %. Finally, other factors are also important and enable farmers to adopt new technologies. These are farm insurance and access to farm credit, which increase the likelihood of adopting new agricultural technology by 10 % and 4.83 % respectively. The study shows that adopting new agricultural technologies would require an accelerated education for all while promoting insurance and access to agricultural credit.