Centre approves Rs 2,817-crore mission to create digital public infrastructure in farm sector

A budgetary allocation of Rs 2,817 crore has been made for the mission, and Rs 1,940 crore of it will be provided by the Centre. The mission will be rolled out nationally over the next two years (till 2025-26). It was initially planned to be launched in the financial year 2021-22 but could not be rolled out because of the Covid outbreak, said a source. Later, the Government announced the building of digital public infrastructure for agriculture in the Union Budgets 2023-24 and 2024-25.

“Buoyed by the success of the pilot project, our government, in partnership with the states, will facilitate the implementation of the digital public infrastructure (DPI) in agriculture for coverage of farmers and their lands in three years. During this year, a digital crop survey for kharif using the DPI will be taken up in 400 districts. The details of 6 crore farmers and their lands will be brought into the farmer and land registries,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, announcing Digital Public Infrastructure for Agriculture in her Budget speech on July 23.

According to sources, three DPI projects will be undertaken as part of the mission. These are Agristack, Krishi Decision Support System, and soil profile mapping. AgriStack consists of three foundational registries or databases in the agriculture sector—the farmers’ registry, geo-referenced village maps and the crop sown registry, all created and maintained by the state governments or Union Territories.

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

For the creation of unique farmer IDs, pilots have been conducted in six districts—Farrukhabad (Uttar Pradesh), Gandhinagar (Gujarat), Beed (Maharashtra), Yamuna Nagar (Haryana), Fatehgarh Sahib (Punjab), and Virudhunagar (Tamil Nadu), said a source.

The sources said the Government aims to create digital identities for 11 crore farmers, of which six crore farmers will be covered in the financial year 2024-25, three crore in 2025-26, and two crore farmers in 2026-27.

The crop sown registry will have the details of crops planted by farmers. This will be recorded through mobile-based ground surveys, or digital crop surveys, in each season.

The Krishi Decision Support System, launched recently, will create a comprehensive geospatial system to unify remote sensing-based information on crops, soil, weather, water resources, etc.

Under the mission, detailed soil profile maps on a 1:10,000 scale of about 142 million hectares of the country’s agricultural land are envisaged to be completed. A soil profile inventory of about 29 million hectares has already been completed, said a source.

The source said the Digital General Crop Estimation Survey would provide yield estimates based on scientifically designed crop-cutting experiments. This will prove very useful in making accurate estimates of agricultural production, the source added.