Importance of AgriStack
- The government has a goal of tripling farmers’ income by the year 2022. An Inter-Ministerial Committee has been established by the government to investigate issues pertaining to the real-terms doubling of farmers’ income by the year 2022 and to recommend a plan of action.
- Agriculture-related inventions have great promise and are rapidly advancing. The most recent technology are helping farmers greatly in their efforts to maximize inputs, streamline farm management, and increase production.
- The successful implementation of technology is essential for the Ministry’s ambitions. The committee has recognized the value of digital technology in, among other things, updating and organizing how rural India manages its agricultural activities. Modern agriculture makes use of cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, blockchain, internet of things (IoT), GPS, and others.
Digital AgriStack
Agristack is a collection of digital information and technology aimed at farmers and the agricultural industry. AgriStack will give farmers a standardized platform to offer end-to-end services along the entire agriculture and food value chain. It seeks to give India a stronger push toward the digitization of data, from land titles to medical information. As part of the program, each farmer will receive a special digital identification (farmers’ ID) that will contain personal data, information on the land they farm, as well as productivity and financial data. Every ID will be connected to the person’s Aadhaar ID. In addition, the government is creating a centralized platform for farmer services that will assist in digitizing the provision of agricultural services by the public and commercial sectors. The architecture for AgriStack was described in a paper on the India Digital Ecosystem Architecture (IDEA) that the government released in June 2021. IDEA is anticipated to make sure that state and central data are separate architectural components that can work together to provide farmers with the information they need.
A Memorandum of Understanding was recently inked between the Ministry of Agriculture and Microsoft to operate a pilot program for 100 villages across six states. According to the MoU, Microsoft must use its cloud computing technologies to develop a “Unified Farmer Service Interface.” AgriStack, a collection of technology-based interventions in agriculture, is the foundation upon which the ministry intends to build the rest of its initiatives. The Indian Agritech Market was worth $204 million in 2019 and about 50 start-ups receive private capital each year. The industry continues to receive a lot of attention and enough funding. But the market is still modest, just collecting 1% of the potential market.