Context

• The Centre published a consultation paper on an India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) and sought public feedback by the end of the month.
• IDEA lays out a proposed framework for ‘AgriStack’.

Background

• Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft to run a pilot programme for 100 villages in 6 states.
• The MoU requires Microsoft to create a ‘Unified Farmer Service Interface’ through its cloud computing services.
• This will be a part of ‘AgriStack’ that the Govt. envisages to create.
• Agristack is a collection of technology-based interventions in agriculture, on which everything else will be built.
• 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.
• AgriStack will create “a unified platform for farmers to provide them end to end services across the agriculture food value chain.
• The government, through its MoU, aims to provide ‘required data sets’ of farmers’ personal information to Microsoft to develop a farmer interface for ‘smart and well-organised agriculture’.
• Thereafter, the ministry signed four other MoUs that will include
• ‘farmer data sanitisation’, land profiling and crop estimation using remote sensing
• mobile applications, for pre- and post-harvest advisories.
• a mobile application for advising farmers on soil nutrition, accurate quantification on farmer crop and yield, fertiliser recommendations, and training farmers for using this application
• a “National Agri Data Stack” that can serve as a foundational data layer on which “agri focussed solutions” will be built.
• It will also offer its cloud services to solution providers to help build “solutions across agri value chain” and will also help agriculture related start-ups.
• a ‘national agriculture geo hub’, will provide the required GIS tools and technologies and create and collate farmer and other agriculture data services on GIS platform.
• With these, agriculture will become the latest sector getting a boost of ‘techno solutionism’ by the government.

Significance

• Digital farming technologies and services, including sensors to monitor cattle, drones to analyse soil and apply pesticide, can improve yields and significantly boost farmers’ incomes.
• As of now most of the farmers are small and marginal who are deprived of formal credit and advanced technologies. This results in poor incomes.

Major Concerns

• Absence of a data protection legislation - private entities could exploit farmers’ data to whatever extent they wish to.
• Commercialisation of agriculture- Agristack could strengthen the asymmetry in information flow by providing all information about farmers and their farming easily to corporations who looked at farmers as a consumer base, be it agri inputs — seed, chemical fertiliser and pesticides, machinery companies or fin-tech companies and to those for whom farmers were suppliers like the food industry, garment industry, etc,
• Purposeless Non-disclosure agreement - Although there is a non-disclosure agreement in the MoU, there is also a clause on ‘limitation of liability’. The net result is that farmers’ data is being provided to the companies at their word with little consequence for breaking it.
• No Dispute Settlement Mechanism- If land dispute arises
• Exclusion of landless cultivators -Digitisation can also exclude pastoral communities, Dalits and indigenous people who are often prevented from owning land. These cultivators and farmers are still not part of data systems and they are not recognised as farmers.
• Mimanaged land Records: The proposition of a “farmers’ database” based on digitised land records will lead to problems given the seriously flawed condition of the digitised land records and their failure to capture the information of actual cultivators.

Way Ahead

• It is important to bring the benefits of digital technology to farmers, but such digital infrastructure should be owned by the government, not private corporate- Farmers’ Organisations.
• The current model is more focussed on using the government’s existing databases and geared towards corporate revenue models, rather than ensuring that farmers’ needs and interests are considered.
• Further steps should be taken by Government based on the public feedback on IDEA and results of pilot trials.
• Technology can provide a fillip to farmers but only when they remain at the top of this stack that the government is building.

https://epaper.thehindu.com/Home/ShareArticle?OrgId=GNQ8NK6R6.1&imageview=0

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/agriculture/agristack-the-new-digital-push-in-agriculture-raises-serious-concerns-77613

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-tech-farming-trfn-idUSKCN2E01XI\

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