The government is in the process of reforming the agriculture sector. It proposes to do so with the aid of technological interventions and a series of digitisation processes of various interactions within the sector resulting in the formation of a digital ecosystem. The ecosystem aims to have all stakeholders in a digital environment and allow seamless interaction between them.
On 1st June 2021, the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare (DACFW) uploaded a consultation paper on the “India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture” (IDEA) which lays out the architecture for establishing the ecosystem. Considering how crucial agriculture is to the incomes of many and the close connection with food security, interventions must always consider the protection of interests, autonomy, and privacy of farmers.
AgriStack project
Gleaning from the government documents, AgriStack seeks to enable direct benefit transfers, assist in yield forecasting and price discovery, access to credit, etc. The government says the project will help “in effective planning towards increasing the income of farmers in particular and improving the efficiency of the agriculture sector as a whole”.
However, there are gaps regarding the on-ground percolation of these protections and supporting regulatory architecture. A brief overview of the AgriStack ecosystem points that various fields of data are being collected, which includes personal details of the farmer, the profile of land, production history, and financial details. The net benefit of digitising these interactions come in the form of more effective means of service delivery, novel use cases such as supply chain transparency, extending credit to the underserved, amongst other things.
For example, a farmer will be able to directly transact with digital lending companies, get granular information about the various agri-inputs like seeds, fertilisers, etc. These data points are linked to a unique ID for every farmer and proposals to include land records within the ambit of this unique ID.
As it stands, a huge portion of land records are not accurate and have a history of being poorly maintained. Having improper upkeep of the land records can have adverse effects, including but not limited to land grabs. Moreover, there are concerns that this could lead to the disenfranchisement of landless farmers and labourers and further deepen the inequality that is prevalent in the sector. It may also deprive traditional communities who depend on non-written land rights of their centuries-old sustenance.
Digital payments
The ministry has proposed the development of a Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI) within the ecosystem. UFSI is envisaged to play a role comparable to UPI (Unified Payment Interface) in the space of digital payments, with the aim to facilitate easier transactions between the multiple stakeholders in this space. Once all the stakeholders are within the digital ecosystem, interactions between them will be facilitated through the UFSI.
Ideally, AgriStack should be introduced after the passage of the PDP Bill to safeguard the privacy of farmers. We need legal frameworks to determine how companies and other stakeholders in the present AgriStack system should be storing and using data. Presently, the regulation does not prescribe binding conditions for processes at various stages of the data life cycle.
For example, there is no clarity on what data minimisation looks like or what limits apply to data processing. This may create negative externalities when widespread data collection and analysis is enabled without a check in the ecosystem. In the current format, access to farm and farmer statistics allows for companies in the agriculture industry to monetise data as well as indulge in targeted advertising.
Sharing with wider ecosystem
Agriculture data inevitably includes non-personal data as well, such as weather patterns of a region. Sharing such data with a wider ecosystem of market players, regulators etc needs to be thought of carefully. A framework for facilitating such data flows for “public good” purposes is under deliberation by the Expert Committee chaired by Kris Gopalakrishnan.
For the sake of efficiency, it is better to synergise the efforts of building the digital infrastructure with the relevant regulatory frameworks that are being developed. The emphasis on data protection stems from, in part, the need to maximise the agency of the end-user so that they can be in charge of data that pertains to them. Consent is usually seen as necessary compliance in this regard, which is not mandated in the absence of a robust data protection regime. However, AgriStack and the digital ecosystem is fertile ground for innovation that could benefit farmers.
Foundational principles
Agritech such as online marketplaces, financial services that can support this sector, precision technology for analysing various metrics of the crop, information and advisory to farmers, etc. have the potential to scale and serve the farmers who are currently underserved. In 2019, India’s agritech market size was $204 million, with roughly 50 start-ups receiving private funding annually. The sector still gets a lot of sufficient investments. Many accounting firms have noted the space is still small, capturing merely 1 per cent of the total market potential.
Certain foundational principles regarding developing digital public infrastructure such as AgriStack must be agreed upon. In the process of establishing any Govtech system, the primacy of viewing inclusion as a key objective can not be overstated. These include governance, oversight, accountability measures, security and privacy principles, amongst others. Contours of the public-private interface in these open ecosystems need to be studied to lay out the redlines and bright lines that will prioritise farmer welfare.
The systems that we are creating are useful and could provide immense benefit, but the supporting wheels need to be well oiled for it to work efficiently for everyone.
(Rizvi is Founder, The Dialogue, and Karthik Venkatesh, Program Manager, The Dialogue)