The Digital Agricultural Mission has two critical components: the Agri Stack and the Krishi Decision Support System besides a third soil profile maps. These initiatives carry forward several earlier initiatives to harness digital technology for India's agricultural development. 

However, the DAM fundamentally differs from earlier Government development plans because this initiative seeks to build something grander – a digital public infrastructure (DPI) for the agricultural sector in India, which has scope for industrial and service sector interplay in both developing the mission and in reaping benefits from its outcomes.

Understanding Digital Public Infrastructure

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), as envisioned by the government, should ideally culminate in a digital solution for developmental initiatives. The DPI involves blocks or platforms of digital identification, and data exchange solutions, among other things, to create an ‘infrastructure’ on which multiple digital initiatives can be built. 

The simple idea is to create a digital platform using available real-time data and then utilise it for multiple purposes across different schemes and policy measures.

Good global examples of effective DPI in India would be earlier initiatives like Aadhaar-based UIDAI and UPI-based digital payment systems. Both these have proven to be reasonably efficient digital models that are helping a substantial part of the population across the board. 

The Criticality Of Agri Stack

Agri Stack is the next part of India Stack's grander vision, which seeks to develop “a set of open APIs (Application Programming Interface) and digital public goods that aim to unlock the economic primitives of identity, data, and payments at population scale.” 

The Agri Stack is a central data depository consisting of a farmers’ registry, geo-referenced village maps, and crop sown registry. The idea is to create a unique database of 11 Crore farmers in India (who will be given a unique ID akin to Aadhaar) and their land holdings and cropping details. 

The latter is proposed to be executed via a state-of-the-art Digital Crop Survey covering 400 districts. The pilots for digital crop survey have been successfully completed in 6 states in India. 

One key stumbling block that Agri Stack had to negotiate is that given agriculture is a state subject, much of the data is at the state level. To solve this challenge, the government has already signed MoUs (memorandum of understandings) with 19 states. The central government seeks to engage all states under this new Digital Agricultural Mission.

Involving The Agri-Business & Financial Sectors 

The database will be supplemented by detailed soil profile mapping of 142 million hectares of agricultural land in India, water availability, drought/flood monitoring, weather forecasting, and monitoring by leveraging geospatial satellite data. 

All these initiatives collectively have the potential to revolutionise Indian agriculture - including planning cropping patterns, harvests, and storage space requirements. Implicitly it will also help agro-based industries in their purchase, pricing and production decisions.  

It will also usher in informed decision-making for agricultural loans or crop insurance, better disaster mitigation, digital authentication and access to services (lowering paperwork and procedural delays), and enhanced efficiency in all agricultural initiatives.

The DAM also differs from earlier initiatives because the programme is not just a public sector initiative. The Agri Stack is expected to help develop synergies for greater private sector involvement in the agricultural sector, especially in the Agritech sector.

Boosting Agricultural Tech & Start-Ups 

Agritech, is very much part of the technological innovation in the recent start-up boom and the sector is expected to get a fillip from the host of data that will be available from both the agri-stack and soil maps. 

The Indian agritech sector witnessed massive investment inflow in recent times, especially in 2022.

From an already high level of around US$ 300 million annually in FY20 and FY21, the investment peaked manifold to US$ 1,279 million in FY22, and finally ‘slumped’ in FY23 amidst a general start-up funding winter. But even then, it was considerable at US$ 706 million during the slump, more than double of FY21 and FY20 figures.

As in any other digital sector, the Indian scenario was part of the broader global scenario of investment tide and wane. However, in the case of Agritech, the investments helped create greater resonance with the policymakers.

Agri Stack And Agritech: The Winning Combo

Indian agritech start-ups work across various verticals, like agri-financing, in-farms solutions, quality management, R&D, and adoption of the latest biotech innovations. They offer innovative solutions for precision farming, online marketplaces for products and inputs, state-of-the-art supply chain and cold storage solutions, data-driven decision-making at farm levels, and quality management. 

The Agritech while being rich in potential was seriously handicapped by the deeply fragmented agricultural sector. Indian agriculture is largely an unorganised sector, and though it is the largest employment-generating segment, it is predominantly informal. 

These factors create serious structural impediments to tech adoption (or rollout), limiting the scope and reach of the agritech sector.

The agritech sector sorely needed the Digital Agricultural Mission as much as Indian agriculture requires such agritech solutions. This can be perceived as a win-win for all stakeholders involved. The steady infusion of earlier investment in Agritech was, in a way, looking for the opportunity to develop the Agri Stack. 

Therefore, it is no coincidence that the surge of agritech investment in the last few years was followed by the Indian government launching the Agri Stack in December 2022. 

The announcement involved the government entering several MoUs with big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, JIO Platforms, ITC Limited, and CISCO, to develop Proof of Concept (PoC) for building the Agri Stack for India. 

The rapid fruition of the entire process within two years also reflects the sense of urgency driving the whole initiative.

The growth at the agrarian sector at base level and the tech service sector at the top level by this digital initiative can create multiplier effect across multiple sectors, like agricultural manufacturing, chemical and fertiliser sector, agricultural training and R&D, and so on.  

 

(The author is a New Delhi-based economist with over a decade's experience in studying the digital sector. Views expressed are personal.)