The Indian government intends to make a national database of farmers and is also in the process of bringing out a data policy for the farm sector. The government plans to form a federated National Farmers Database and the digitized land records will be used as data attributes for creating this database.
Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar said that to bring dynamism to the farmer’s database, the linkage with digital land record management system is essential and as of now the federated farmers’ database is being built by taking the publicly available data as existing in the Department of Agriculture and in various data silos in government and linking them with the digitized land records.
Agriculture ministry along with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is in the process of bringing out a data policy for the agricultural sector.
The database is envisioned to enable online single sign-on facilities for universal access and usher the personalized services to farmers such as direct benefit transfer, soil and plant health advisories, weather advisories, irrigation facilities, and seamless credit and insurance facilities.
It will also provide information pertaining to seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, nearby logistic facilities, market access information, and peer to peer lending of farm equipment, among others.
“The aim is to increase farmers’ income by leveraging the available data and developing solutions based on the data so that the input costs are reduced, ease of farming is ensured, quality is improved, and farmers get better-price for their farm produce,” said Tomar.
The Unified Farmers Service Interface/Agristack will have a data exchange which would bring in all data related to the agricultural sector in a federated platform with the federated farmers’ database as its core. In order to create UFSI/Agristack, the department is in the process of finalizing ‘India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)’ which will lay down a framework for the digital agriculture sector in the country.
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 for subject matter specialists, agro-industry, farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs).
The IDEA would help in laying down the architecture for the Agristack in the country and that would serve as a foundation to build innovative agri-focused solutions leveraging emerging technologies.