Abstract  

Jayalaxmi Agrotech (JAT) is a company based out of a small village called H.B. Halli in Bellary district of Karnataka, which helps farmers in availing correct and timely information at their fingertips using mobile technology. JAT created a mobile app which can be used to access information about various crop varieties, diseases, fertilizers, and pesticides and other details on irrigation, micronutrients, etc. This app pushes data on almost real-time basis to a server regarding the features accessed by the farmers from the app. This data can be analyzed to assess the usage of the app and some of the attributes can act as proxy data to understand prevalent diseases and the varieties of crops grown in specific areas. Anand, the founder of JAT, wanted to understand this data and gain some valuable insights which could help farmers with decision making.  The major dilemma for Anand was to either prove or disprove several claims about plant diseases that were prevalent among the farmers.

Learning Objective  

The case can be used as a resource for teaching statistical concepts like hypothesis tests such as Z test, t test, proportion test, two sample t tests for proportion and mean, ANOVA, Pearson correlation, etc.  The case uses the mobile app usage data collected by Jayalaxmi Agro Tech that acts as a proxy data for prevalence of plant diseases across different regions in the Karnataka state of India.  The case can be used as part of courses such as quantitative techniques, data science, business analytics and machine learning at graduate level.