Kisan Suvidha App Has Over 10 Lakh Downloads: Narendra Singh Tomar

Addressing the parliament on Tuesday (July 9), Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar said that Kisan Suvidha Mobile App and Pusa Krishi Mobile App have 10,63,080 and 40,753 downloads respectively since their launch.

Launched in 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kisan Suvidha app provides information on weather, market prices, seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and agricultural machinery. On the other hand, Pusa Krishi Mobile App disseminates information about the latest technologies developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute.

The Modi government for the past few years has been working on making farmers, more self-sufficient, where they could explore more out of farming such as the farm-to-fork movement in order to generate more profits. To be noted that agriculture provides 44% of the total employment in the country.

The Modi government has repeatedly iterated that it wants to build a startup ecosystem in every district and every village in order to enable 50K new startups by 2024. In order to develop the income of the farmers, the government also launched the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) on February 24, 2019.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, about 12 Cr farmers are expected to benefit from PM-KISAN scheme. Under this scheme, which was announced during Interim Budget 2019, small and marginal farmers will be given INR 6000 yearly in three instalments of INR 2000.

So far, under the PM Kisan Yojana, the government has enrolled 36.6 Mn beneficiaries. Of these. Out of these, 30.3 Mn have been paid the first instalment of 2,000 and 19.9 Mn have received the second instalment as well.

A 2018 report from Datalabs by Inc42 showed that the total funding in agritech startups in India has grown from $46.1 Mn (INR 320 Cr) 2017 to $66.6 Mn (INR 463 Cr) in 2018, which is indicative of the growing investor interest in this sector.

The income of the farmers in India is a key focus area for the government and the Union Budget 2019 further reiterated the same. The current government has an ambitious aim, that of doubling the average income of farmers by 2022.