How digital public infrastructure is rewiring India’s farmlands for scale, sustainability and farmer empowerment

The Indian farmer feeds the nation, yet has long waited for his own digital thali. While the rest of India enjoys seamless data, credit, and services, agriculture still struggles with fragmented information and delayed decisions. Unless India builds a connected digital fabric across farmlands, sustainable growth will remain elusive. Like Aadhaar and UPI transformed identity and payments, digital agriculture infrastructure can reshape how farmers access services and manage risks—making digital transformation strategic national infrastructure.

Thankfully, a lot has been happening in the last few years. India’s Digital Agriculture Mission aims to create an interconnected digital fabric of farmlands by integrating AgriStack registries, Digital Crop Survey data, soil resource mapping, and decision-support systems such as Krishi-DSS. These initiatives are laying the foundation for standardised, real-time agricultural data across farmers, land, and crops. While implementation is being rolled out in phases across states, the mission’s success will depend on a sustained focus on interoperability, data standardization, and capacity building—so that digital infrastructure translates into tangible improvements on the ground.

Scale Remains the Hardest Part

India does not suffer from a shortage of agricultural pilots. There is an overwhelming wave of innovation in this space, with over 1,000 agritech startups. The challenge lies in scaling digital technologies across India’s vast diversity of climate zones, soil types, cropping patterns, and landholdings. Agriculture employs nearly half of India’s workforce but contributes less than a fifth of GDP—a structural imbalance driven by too many livelihoods depending on too little value creation per worker. This has to change.

The government has rolled out some brilliant initiatives. Expanded irrigation coverage, wider crop insurance penetration, improved access to institutional credit through Kisan Credit Cards, agri-financing reforms, and the integration of over 1,500 mandis on the e-NAM platform have been pivotal breakthroughs. Yet digital technology must now move to center stage in India’s farmlands.

Digital technologies—sensors, satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, and big data—allow farmers to make precise, data-driven decisions. Predictive weather models, pest surveillance, irrigation optimization, nutrient management, and harvest-timing analytics reduce waste and improve productivity. For a country where nearly 86 per cent of farmers are small and marginal, digital infra allows unprecedented reach and impact.

The Digital Agriculture Mission, AgriStack, digital crop surveys, and AI-enabled advisory platforms create common rails for innovation. Unlike fragmented apps that operate in silos, DPI enables interoperability, trust, and scale—the building blocks of lasting transformation.

Inside the Digital Backbone

AgriStack, the core DPI for agriculture, consists of three foundational registries maintained by states and Union Territories: geo-referenced village maps, the crop-sown registry, and the farmer registry. The farmer registry provides authenticated data on demographics, landholdings, and crops sown, enabling seamless access to services such as credit, insurance, procurement, and subsidies.

The Digital Crop Survey (DCS) system captures crop-sown details directly from the field through mobile interfaces. By generating accurate, real-time crop area data for every plot, the DCS improves production estimates and policy responses.

The nationwide Soil Resource Mapping project is inventorying soils at the village level using high-resolution satellite and ground data, supporting rational land use and sustainable crop planning.

Geospatial platform Krishi-DSS brings these data streams together, integrating satellite imagery, weather data, soil profiles, crop signatures, reservoir and groundwater information, and government scheme databases. It supports automated yield estimation, drought and flood monitoring, and evidence-based decision-making.

As of February 2026, over 8.48 crore farmers have been provided digital IDs (Kisan IDs) under the AgriStack initiative, linking them to land records, crops sown, and government benefits. This digital infrastructure, aimed at covering 11 crore farmers by 2026–27, is currently active across 19 states.

Making Technology Accessible

The biggest challenge remains that many farmers are digitally excluded due to literacy gaps, language barriers, and uneven connectivity—the familiar India-Bharat divide. For technology to be transformative, it must meet farmers where they are.

Initiatives like Kisan e-Mitra, a multilingual AI-powered chatbot, assist farmers with queries related to PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, PM Fasal Bima Yojana, and Kisan Credit Card, supporting 11 regional languages.

Similarly, the National Pest Surveillance System leverages AI and machine learning to detect pest infestations and enable timely interventions, helping farmers reduce crop losses. Used by over 10,000 extension workers, the system allows farmers to upload pest images for diagnosis and currently supports 66 crops and over 432 pests. AI-based analytics are also being deployed for crop–weather matching and satellite-based crop monitoring, enabling more precise advisories and risk mitigation. These solutions demonstrate how technology can be designed with the farmer at the center, breaking down barriers of language, literacy, and access.

The Path Forward

Building an interconnected digital fabric of farmlands is not without challenges. State-level adoption remains uneven. Integration of credit and financial services—though promising through farmer registry-linked authentication—must scale across all states and banks. Data standardisation, quality field-level data collection, and administrative capacity require sustained investment.

With aligned policy, scalable digital infrastructure, and farmer-first innovation—from both public institutions and private agritech players—India can transform agriculture into a resilient, globally competitive sector that genuinely uplifts farmer livelihoods.

The power of the digital thali lies not in any single element, but in how thoughtfully the pieces come together—creating an ecosystem where every farmer has access to the data, services, and support they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world.