Digital Technology to Aid Farmers

WHY IN NEWS?

• The Committee on Doubling Farmers’ Income (DFI) in its Report has appreciated the role of Digital Technology, which can play a transformational role in modernizing and organizing how rural India performs its agricultural activities.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY TO AID FARMERS:

• Digital Agriculture is “ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and data ecosystems to support the development and delivery of timely, targeted information and services to make farming profitable and sustainable while delivering safe nutritious and affordable food for all.”

BENEFITS:

• Increases agriculture productivity.
• Prevents soil degradation.
• Reduces chemical application in crop production.
• Efficient use of water resources.
• Disseminates modern farm practices to improve the quality, quantity and reduced cost of production.
• Changes the socio-economic status of farmers.                                         

CHALLENGES:

• High Capital Costs: It discourages the farmers to adopt digital methods of farming.
• Small Land Holdings: Indian farms are very small in size and 1-2 acres farm plots are the most common. Also, agricultural land leasing under various arrangements is widely prevalent in India.
• Renting and Sharing Practices: Due to both limited financial resources and small farm plots, renting and sharing platforms rather than outright purchase for equipment and machinery like tractors, harvesters etc.
• Illiteracy in Rural Area: The lack of basic computer literacy hinders the fast development of e-Agriculture.

MAJOR INITIATIVES AND SCHEMES:

• AGMARKNET
  • Agricultural Marketing Information Network (AGMARKNET) was launched in 2000 by the Union Ministry of Agriculture
  • The Directorate of Marketing and Inspection (DMI), under the Ministry, links around 7,000 agricultural wholesale markets in India with the State Agricultural Marketing Boards and Directorates for effective information exchange.
  • This e-governance portal AGMARKNET, implemented by National Informatics Centre (NIC), facilitates generation and transmission of prices, commodity arrival information from agricultural produce markets, and web-based dissemination to producers, consumers, traders, and policymakers transparently and quickly.
• e-choupal
  • An initiative by ITC provides alternative marketing channel, information on weather, agricultural practices, input sales, etc.
  • It is a kiosk located in a village and equipped with computer and internet access, which is managed by trained sanchalak.
• Direct benefit transfer (DBT) Central Agri Portal
  • Launched in 2013, the DBT Agri Portal is a unified central portal for agricultural schemes across the country
  • The portal helps farmers adopt modern farm machineries through government subsidies

• National Agriculture Market (e-NAM)
  • e-marketing platform at national level and to support creation of infrastructure to enable e-marketing in regulated markets across the country
  • This innovative market process is revolutionizing Agricultural markets by ensuring better price discovery, bringing in transparency and competition to enable farmers to get improved remuneration for their produce in moving towards ‘One Nation One Market’
• Kisan Call centre
  • Main aim of the project is to answer farmers’ queries on a telephone call in their own dialect
• Village Resource Centres 
  • Village Resource Centres provide space-based services in the rural areas. They are one of the unique initiatives that use Satellite Communication (SATCOM) network and Earth Observation (EO) satellite data to reach out to the villages to address the needs of the local people in villages themselves.
• Digital Agriculture Mission
  • The Digital Agriculture Mission (2021–2025) aims to support and accelerate projects based on new technologies, like AI, block chain, remote sensing and GIS technology and use of drones and robots
• 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
• AgriStack
  • • The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has planned creating ‘AgriStack’ – a collection of technology-based interventions in agriculture.

Other State level Initiatives:

• Esagu
  • ‘eSagu’ is a web-based personalized agro-advisory system which uses Information Technology to solve the unscientific agricultural practices.
  • Sagu means cultivation in Telugu-local language of Telangana Andhra Pradesh, the region in which the project started.
  • E-Sagu means electronic cultivation.
• AGRISNET
  • interconnected technology enabled network to deliver informational services effectively to the farming community.
  • The project aimed to integrate cross-functional processes of the Department of Agriculture in Tamilnadu
• Jio Agri(JioKrishi) Platform
  • Launched in 2020, it digitises the agricultural ecosystem along the entire value chain to empower farmers
  • The core function of the platform uses stand-alone application data to provide advisory, the advanced functions use data from various sources, feed the data into AI/ML algorithms and provide accurate personalised advice.