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Abstract
Today a new paradigm of agricultural development is fast emerging: in both developing and developed countries the overall development of rural areas is expanding in new directions; old ways of delivering important services to citizens are being challenged; and traditional societies are being transformed into knowledge societies all over the world. The report of the ‘Task Force on India as Knowledge Superpower’ (GOI, 2001) emphasised the necessity of developing the capacity to generate, absorb, disseminate and protect knowledge and exploit it as a powerful tool to derive societal transformation. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is seen as an important means of achieving such a transformation. When used as a broad tool for providing local farming communities with scientific knowledge, ICT heralds the formation of knowledge societies in the rural areas of the developing world. However, this can only be realised when knowledge and information are effectively harvested for overall agricultural and rural development. The development of precision farming in countries of the North emphasizes knowledge-intensity; hence the agricultural paradigm in the developing world will have to be recast to take advantage of knowledge availability to achieve multiple goals: of income, food, jobs, etc. ICT has a significant role to perform in evolving such a paradigm, as was evident from the Interdisciplinary Dialogue on IT: Reaching the Unreached (Swaminathan, 1993).