With the launch of Digital Agriculture Mission, the government hopes to see significant impact over the next 2-3 years in some areas such as grain procurement, crop insurance scheme PMFBY and crop production estimates.
“We are building a digital public infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture, which will have credible and verified data on agriculture sector. Various agencies of the government can use the DPI for re-engineering their current processes to provide hassle free services to farmers in near real time,” said Pramod Kumar Meherda, Additional Secretary in the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare. He said there are several components under the Mission and the recent launch of Krishi Decision Support System portal is one of them.
The Cabinet on September 2 approved the ₹2,817-crore Digital Agriculture Mission, under which the Centre’s share will be ₹1,940 crore and the Budget has to be spent by March 31, 2026.
Providing details, a senior official said several data related to farming and farmers, which are currently scattered at different places, some of those even in physical form, are being digitised, a senior official said. For instance, data of land records (including Swamitva certificate), fertiliser and other inputs application, indebtedness are available with State governments, whereas many other information is scattered at Cooperation Ministry, Animal Husbandry Ministry, Rural Development Ministry and Panchayati Raj Ministry, which will be now collated at one place to avoid any anomaly in the sector.
Uniform data
Though, the objective is to have a consolidated database on a single platform instead of having multiple database and different platforms, both platforms will continue, but the data will be uniform, officials said.
The government hopes that after 2-3 years farmers would be able to digitally identify and authenticate themselves to access benefits and services, obviating cumbersome paperwork and with little or no need to physically visit various offices or service providers.
“A farmer would be able to access crop loans, paperless MSP-based procurement, crop insurance, credit card-linked crop loans connected to agri-input suppliers and buyers of agricultural produce, with minimal or no documentation,” the senior official said.
The Digital Agriculture Mission will also help the government to frame evidence-based policies on pricing, import and export of agricultural produce as the ‘digitally captured data on crop-sown area’, ‘Digital General Crop Estimation survey-based yield’ and ‘remote-sensing data’ will help in accurate crop production estimation, the official said.
MoUs with States
The government had announced DPI for agriculture in the Union Budget 2023-24. “The DPI for agriculture aims to provide comprehensive and useful data on farmers, including tenant farmers, comprising authenticated demographic details, land holdings and crops sown,” an official statement said Monday.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is being signed with each state government to create and implement the DPI for agriculture an 19 States have signed MoUs with the Union Agriculture Ministry.
For the creation of Farmer IDs, pilots have been conducted in one district each across 6 States: Uttar Pradesh (Farrukhabad), Gujarat (Gandhinagar), Maharashtra (Beed), Haryana (Yamuna Nagar), Punjab (Fatehgarh Sahib), and Tamil Nadu (Virudhnagar).