This new situation has challenged policymakers to rethink conventional wisdom, the survey says. To turn the agricultural sector into a big solution, going back to traditional farming practices and reorienting policies could increase value addition in agriculture, boost farmers’ incomes, and create opportunities for food processing and exports. Such a strategy can make the farming sector both appealing and productive for India’s urban youth, the survey said.
The role of technology in improving India’s agriculture has been stressed often in recent times. Just as India Stack, a set of digital components such as Aadhaar and UPI, revolutionised the economy through paperless, presence-less and cashless delivery of services and transactions. India Stack is the basis of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure which has drawn praise worldwide. Now the government is working on an ‘Agri Stack‘ so that a digital system of identity, data and payments can be built to formalise and streamline the agriculture sector.
What is Agri Stack?
Agri Stack is Digital Public Infrastructure for the agriculture sector. It is a database of farmers with details like their agriculture landholding, GPS coordinates of each plot and crops grown on them, and income, credit and insurance history. In her Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said a pilot project to implement DPI in the agriculture sector was successful and will lead to its full implementation.
“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. Further, the issuance of Jan Samarth based Kisan Credit Cards will be enabled in five states,” she said.
A unique farmer identification number, or ID, will be provided to each farmer and the database will have linkages to the government benefits availed by farmers. A Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI) will be the application programming interface or the service layer to provide data to others. “Agri Stack is ‘Aadhaar plus’ for the Indian agriculture ecosystem,” Rajeev Chawla, strategic advisor and chief knowledge officer at the Union agriculture and farmer welfare ministry, has told ET recently. He said 60 million farmer IDs will be given by the end of this financial year. “We already know 100 million farmers who avail the PM Kisan scheme. We have created farmer IDs for them in advance but have not activated them,” he said.
Why India needs Agri Stack
Historically, poor land records have been a major problem in formalisation of the agriculture sector. Lack of proper land records also frustrates implementation of agricultural schemes at the national level. This means agriculture, on which more than 50% Indians are dependent, remains a fragmented sector with poor visibility and thus impervious to policy intervention.
Land titles in India are unclear because of various reasons. The system of land records was inherited from the zamindari system, the legal framework in India does not provide for guaranteed ownership, and the manner in which information pertaining to land records is collected and maintained further exacerbates the gaps in these records, as per a PRS Legislative research report. Land records consist of various types of information (property maps, sale deeds) and are maintained across different departments at the district or village level. These departments work in silos, and the data across departments is not updated properly. Hence, discrepancies are often noted in land records.
Poor land records mean difficulty in verifying who owns how much and which piece of land and what grows on it in what time periods. This can hamper required credit flow and insurance payouts to farmers as well as flow of vital information about use of inputs choice of crops and real-time information on market and prices. Often, undefined, unverifiable or unenforced land rights lead to long-drawn legal disputes. Ownership disputes prevent a farmer from using land to access credit besides creating other similar problems.
Agri stack can remove the challenge of addressability in the agricultural sector and thus lead to productivity gains and rise in farmer income.
How Agri Stack will help
Sitharaman has often spoken about reforms in all factors of production including land. Reforms in land will not only improve the agriculture sector but will also boost the overall economy.
In her budget speech, she said that rural land related actions will include (1) assignment of Unique Land Parcel Identification Number (ULPIN) or Bhu-Aadhaar for all lands, (2) digitization of cadastral maps, (3) survey of map sub-divisions as per current ownership, (4) establishment of land registry, and (5) linking to the farmers registry. These actions will all be part of building up the Agri Stack.
“Agriculture knowledge is highly local and contextual. We have hundreds of agriculture research institutes, coordination institutes, people working in the seeds sector, fertiliser sector, and many others who create knowledge,” Pramod Varma, former architect of Aadhaar, has told ET recently. “Unfortunately, they don’t translate to the last mile, to the farmer, in a usable way.”
Local language and technology barriers don’t let farmers access the vast agriculture knowledge, which remains highly fragmented and currently not leverageable, he said. “So, the commitment by the government to build agri DPIs via a set of electronic registries and open networks facilitating knowledge and commerce exchange at the fingertips of the farmer, is commendable,” Varma said.
Agri Stack will solve such challenges. For instance, the latest Economic Survey has prescribed the use of Agri Stack for better targeting of fertiliser subsidy. This will ensure that a fixed quantity of subsidised nutrients are sold to only identified farmers based on parameters such as land ownership and cropping pattern of a particular district.
Agri Stack will help the government organise and scrutinise the data of farmers regarding their land, crops grown and weather forecast. “The technology, besides digitising land records, will help to provide better estimates of crop production and ensure timely action,” RG Agarwal, chairman, Dhanuka Group, an agrochemical manufacturing firm, told ET recently. Pushan Sharma, director-research, CRISIL Market Intelligence & Analytics, said it will promote better credit risk assessment and enhance formal credit penetration for farmers, which currently stands at around 60%.
Since Agri Stack will lead to unencumbered land titles in rural areas, it will not only help a large number of farmers to monetise their land with ease but will also help acquisition of land in a smoother way. The government’s project to digitalise land records includes rejigging land-use policies for urban, forest and agricultural land, which will speed up the key infrastructure projects stuck or delayed due to land acquisition and litigation.
Formalisation of agricultural sector through Agri Stack and resultant higher productivity and efficiency will help the overall economic growth of the country as it will lead to various related industries to smoothly plug into the agriculture sector.