Cabinet Approves INR 2,817 Cr Digital Agriculture Mission To Enhance Farmers’ Income

Days after expanding the scope of the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund (AIF), the union cabinet approved the ‘Digital Agriculture Mission’ scheme with an outlay of INR 2,817 Cr to strengthen the country’s agriculture sector and improve farmers’ income.

The Digital Agriculture Mission will serve as an umbrella scheme to support digital agriculture initiatives, such as creating digital public infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture, implementing the Digital General Crop Estimation Survey (DGCES), and taking up other IT initiatives by the central government, state governments, and academic and research institutions.

The scheme has provisions for soil profile mapping, digital crop estimation, digital yield modelling, crop loan, and modern technologies like AI and Big Data among others, the government said in a statement on Monday (September 2). 

Under the scheme, the Centre aims to build three DPIs – Agristack, Krishi Decision Support System, and Soil Profile Mapping

AgriStack will give digital identity to farmers, similar to Aadhaar, which will be linked to the state’s land records, livestock ownership, crops sown, demographic details, family details, schemes and benefits availed.

Crops sown by farmers will be recorded through mobile-based ground surveys i.e. Digital Crop Survey to be conducted in each season.

The Centre has already signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with 19 state governments to create and implement the DPI for agriculture and the basic IT infrastructure for implementing AgriStack has been developed and is being tested on a pilot basis.

With the Krishi Decision Support System, the Centre aims to build a comprehensive geospatial system to unify remote sensing-based information on crops, soil, weather, water resources, among others.

The scheme aims to profile soil of about 142 Mn hectares of the agricultural land in the country. Of this, detailed soil profiling of about 29 Mn hectares has already been completed, the statement added.

On the DGCES, the statement said that it “will provide yield estimates based on scientifically designed crop-cutting experiments. This initiative will prove very useful in making accurate estimates of agricultural production”.

The Cabinet approval is in line with finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s announcement in her Budget speech this year to set up DPI for agriculture. 

Meanwhile, union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is set to launch the AgriSURE fund – a category II Alternative Investment Fund for startups operating in agriculture and allied sectors.

The INR 750 Cr AgriSURE fund will offer both equity and debt support to agritech startups, with a special emphasis on high-risk, high-impact activities in the agriculture value chain. 

It is pertinent to note that the Indian agricultural sector accounts for nearly 16% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employs nearly 44% of the national workforce. 

While the sector is still plagued by old-age practices and obsolete technology, homegrown agritech startups are trying to transform the Indian agriculture landscape, offering innovative digital solutions from providing weather-based crop advisory and soil analysis to promoting IoT-enabled practices and AI-driven technology.

The fast-growing agriculture sector is expected to become a $24 Bn opportunity by 2025.