The ecosystem will help the government to effectively increase the income of farmers in particular and improving the efficiency of the agriculture sector as a whole
The government is in the process of finalising ’India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)’ which will lay down a framework for Agristack. The department has commenced the work for creating Agristack in the country. Accordingly, a Task Force has been constituted and in furtherance, a Concept Paper on IDEA has already been floated for comments from the general public not only through the department’s website but also through emails especially to subject matter specialists, Agro-Industry, Farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs).
This information was given by Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar in a written reply in Lok Sabha.
The IDEA would help in laying down the architecture for the Agri-stack in the country and that would serve as a foundation to build innovative agri-focused solutions leveraging emerging technologies to contribute effectively in creating a better ecosystem for agriculture in India. 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. As the first step in this direction, the government has already initiated building a federated farmers’ database that would serve as the core of the envisaged Agristack.
No private sector companies are involved as far as the building of the Agristack is concerned. However, leading technology/agri-tech/startUp companies were identified and invited to collaborate with the Government of India to develop Proof of Concepts (PoC) based on small portions of data from the federated Farmers’ database for certain identified areas (Districts/Village).
A public call through the Department’s website has been placed inviting proposals for PoCs. MoUs purely on a pro bono basis with selected companies are being signed, for one year to develop PoCs. The PoCs will help in understanding solutions that can be built using available data and some of them, if found beneficial to the farmers will be scaled up at the national level.
Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare has signed an MoU with Esri India Technologies for working on a PoC in select districts/villages to develop a model for an agriculture Geo-Hub to establish a framework to collect and integrate available geospatial information with other associated information, perform spatial analytics, share results and data and deploy dynamic apps which would support estimates for policy planning, monitoring requirements and ease in decision making.
