Agri-AI can unlock Rs 70,000 crore annual value for farmers, says the Minister

India’s next agricultural revolution will be driven by artificial intelligence, Union Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Dr. Jitendra Singh said on Tuesday, positioning AI as the central pillar of the country’s farm policy, research and investment architecture.

Speaking at the inaugural session of the Global Conference on AI in Agriculture and Investor Summit 2026 (AI4Agri 2026) in Mumbai, Singh said AI offers scalable solutions to structural challenges that have long constrained farm productivity, including erratic weather, information asymmetry and fragmented markets.

“What AI offers is not a new diagnosis. It offers, finally, a prescription that can scale,” he said, adding that even a 10 per cent productivity gain for the 600 million farmers across the Global South would represent “the single largest poverty-reduction opportunity of the century.”

Linking AI to National Strategy

Framing agriculture as a strategic growth sector rather than a legacy one, Singh linked the AI push to the Rs 10,372-crore India AI Mission, aimed at building sovereign compute capacity, national datasets and startup infrastructure at scale.

He highlighted BharatGen, India’s government-owned large language model ecosystem, which has launched “Agri Param,” a domain-specific agriculture model operating in 22 Indian languages. The model enables farmers to access advisory support in their native languages.

“This is AI that speaks to a farmer in Marathi, Bhojpuri or Kannada,” Singh said, underlining linguistic inclusion as critical to digital adoption.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST), he noted, is developing an interoperable India AI Open Stack to ensure agri-AI solutions built across the country can plug into a unified national framework. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is also backing deep-tech and AI research in partnership with IITs, IISc and ICAR, with a strong focus on agriculture applications.

From Drones to Climate Intelligence

Singh pointed to drone and satellite mapping technologies already strengthening Soil Health Cards and the Swamitva Mission by generating verified land and soil data. He also emphasized investments in climate intelligence, integrating Earth Sciences data with AI-driven early warning systems to help farmers “plan, not panic.”

Biotechnology, he added, will play a critical role in developing resilient and disease-resistant crop varieties, enabling early asymptomatic detection of pest and plant diseases, and advancing a circular crop economy.

A Rs 70,000-Crore Opportunity

Highlighting the economic potential, Singh said India’s 140 million farm holdings—most of them small and marginal—could collectively generate an estimated Rs 70,000 crore in annual value if AI-enabled advisories help each farmer save even Rs 5,000 annually through improved input timing, pest prediction and market linkage.

He cited Maharashtra’s Rs 500-crore MahaAgri-AI Policy 2025–29 as a model, adding that the Centre would align and amplify such state-level initiatives.

The Union Budget 2026–27 has proposed ‘Bharat-VISTAAR,’ a multilingual AI tool integrating AgriStack portals and ICAR’s agricultural practices package with AI systems to deliver customised advisory support and reduce farm risk. Singh said the focus would remain on small, purpose-built AI models trained on Indian soil types, climate zones and crop varieties, deployable even in low-connectivity rural areas via mobile phones and farm equipment.

Toward a National Agri-AI Architecture

Calling for a federated national architecture, Singh said agri digital public infrastructures such as MahaAgriX should evolve into a national Agri Data Commons. He invited stakeholders to participate in a proposed National Agri-AI Research Network—a collaboration between DST, state governments, ICRISAT, ICAR and global institutions—to build India-specific foundational datasets covering crops, soil and climate.

Making a direct appeal to investors, Singh described agri-AI as “the largest untapped productivity market in the world” and urged patient capital to back scalable platforms rather than isolated pilots.

“The farmer does not need AI simply for the sake of it. He needs it to be useful. Let that be our compass,” he said, concluding with a call for collaborative delivery and reiterating India’s intent to act not as a recipient but as a co-architect of global agri-AI frameworks.