India’s Digital Ecosystem for Agriculture

  • October 13, 2022
  • Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
  • Category: DPN Topics
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India’s Digital Ecosystem for Agriculture

Subject :Agriculture/Technology

Context: The agriculture ministry has constituted an expert task force in charge of consolidating the ‘India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)’ report.

Concept:

  • In 2021, the Union Minister for agriculture announced the initiation of the ‘Digital Agriculture Mission 2021–2025’.
  • The initiative aims to leverage a wide range of technologies from AI, blockchain along with drone technology to improve the sector’s overall performance.
  • IDEA serves as a important part of the initiative which lays the framework for implementation of digital advancements in agriculture.

Concept of IDEA

  • The farmer and the improvement of farmers’ livelihood is the aim of the IDEA concept and it is proposed to happen through tight integration of agri-tech innovation and the agriculture industry ecosystem to farming and food systems.
  • The IDEA principles explicitly talk about openness of data, which means open to businesses and farmers, indicating the integration.
  • Value-added innovative services by agri-tech industries and start-ups are an integral part of the IDEA architecture.

Key Features of IDEA

  • IDEA lays out framework for ‘Agristack’.
  • Each farmer will have a unique digital identification that contains personal details, information about the land they farm, as well as production and financial details.
  • Each ID will be linked to the individual’s digital national ID Aadhaar.
  • This will create a National Farmers Database, a sort of ‘super Aadhaar’ for farmers.
  • The database will include farmers’ digitised land records (under National Land Records Modernisation Programme) and it is cross-linked with the Aadhaar database so as to create a unique FID, or a farmers’ ID.
  • On top of that, it will pull information from running schemes like the PM Kisan, soil health cards, the national crop insurance scheme PM FasalBimaYojna, and so on.
  • The Unified Farmer Service Interfaceis being built by Microsoft under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare (DoAFW)
  • This database will enable anyone with access to it to
  • uniquely identify a landholder
  • know the extent of his holding
  • the state of the soil
  • cropping patterns and average yields
  • and other such information at a granular level.

Digital Initiatives by GOI

Agri Stack:

  • The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has planned creating ‘AgriStack’ – a collection of technology-based interventions in agriculture.
  • It will create a unified platform for farmers to provide them end to end services across the agriculture food value chain.

Unified Farmer Service Platform (UFSP):

  • UFSP is a combination of Core Infrastructure, Data, Applications and Tools that enable seamless interoperability of various public and private IT systems in the agriculture ecosystem across the country. UFSP is envisaged to play the following role:
    • Act as a central agency in the agri ecosystem (like UPI in the e Payments)
    • Enables Registration of the Service Providers (public and private) and the Farmer Services.
    • Enforces various rules and validations required during the service delivery process.
    • Acts as a Repository of all the applicable standards, API’s (Application Programming Interface) and formats.
    • Act as a medium of data exchange amongst various schemes and services to enable comprehensive delivery of services to the farmer.
  • This will be a part of ‘AgriStack’ that the Govt. envisages to create.

National e-Governance Plan in Agriculture (NeGP-A):

  • A Centrally Sponsored Scheme, it was initially launched in 2010-11 in 7 pilot States, which aims to achieve rapid development in India through use of ICT for timely access to agriculture related information to the farmers.
  • In 2014-15, the scheme was further extended for all the remaining States and 2 UTs.

National Land Records ModernisationProgramme (NRLMP):

  • Under the programme, each farmer will have a unique digital identification (farmers’ ID) that contains personal details, information about the land they farm, as well as production and financial details.
  • Each ID will be linked to the individual’s digital national ID Aadhaar.

Other Digital Initiatives: Kisan Call Centres, Kisan Suvidha App, Agri Market App, Soil Health Card (SHC) Portal, etc.

Agriculture India’s Digital Ecosystem for Agriculture