Context

• Government is in the process of finalising 'India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)' which will lay down a 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

1. ‘farmer data sanitisation’,
2. land profiling and crop estimation using remote sensing mobile applications, for pre- and post-harvest advisories,
3. a mobile application for advising farmers on soil nutrition,
4. accurate quantification on farmer crop and yield,
5. fertiliser recommendations,
6. training farmers for using this application
7. “National Agri Data Stack” that can serve as a foundational data layer on which “agri focussed solutions” will be built.
8. cloud services to solution providers to help build “solutions across agri value chain” and will also help agriculture related start-ups.
9. 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.
• This Ecosystem shall help the Government in effective planning towards increasing the income of farmers in particular and improving the efficiency of the Agriculture sector as a whole

https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1741995

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