As Prime Minister Narendra Modi embarks on his third term, expectations are high for transformative policies to strengthen the agriculture sector through technology and digitization. Key among these initiatives is the implementation of the Centre’s ambitious digital public infrastructure (DPI) initiative for agriculture, highlighted in the BJP’s manifesto “Sankalp Patra.” The DPI aims to eliminate information asymmetry in agriculture and provide farmer-centric solutions and services.
Telangana has already adopted this framework, launching the first agriculture DPI in August last year. Startups and agritech companies are joining the ecosystem as data providers or consumers. The next step is to expand this framework nationally and encourage more states to adopt it.
The agriculture DPI, also known as “Agristack,” consolidates data from government departments, academic institutions, farmer organizations, and private sector stakeholders on a single platform. It includes a federated farmers’ registry, assigning each farmer a unique ID linked to their land record. Additionally, the government is developing a unified farmer service platform to digitize the delivery of agri-services by both public and private sectors. This open-source, interoperable public good ensures accurate data availability for crop planning, access to farm inputs, credit and insurance, crop estimation, and market intelligence. The architecture for core registries, including the farmer registry, geo-referencing of village maps, and crop sown registry, has been finalized. As of February 2024, the app for the farmer registry is developed, geo-referencing for 75 percent of the country’s villages is completed, and the digital crop survey has been launched on a pilot basis in 12 states. The push for DPIs has been a recurring theme in the government’s policies, with AI-driven digital solutions enabled by DPI potentially adding over $65 billion to the Indian agriculture sector.
Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by agrikunba. Publisher: Money Control
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