Among the many changes taking place in the Indian agriculture sector, digitisation and the advent of cutting-edge technology are perhaps the most dynamic and interesting developments. Terms like ‘e-markets’, ‘precision agriculture’, ‘nano-fertilisers’ and so on are becoming rather commonplace these days. Modern farming is going through many changes and AgriStack is one such digital technology that is heralding change and causing much debate as well.

What is AgriStack?

April of 2021 saw the government of India signing a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft Corporation. This MoU is about harnessing Microsoft’s tech prowess in cloud computing to create a Unified Farmer Service Interface and this has been started with 100 villages in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

This is a big part of the government’s plans to implement AgriStack which is a collection of databases and technologies aimed at the agriculture sector and the farmers. Incidentally, the government has also signed MoUs with a few big names such as Amazon Internet Service and Patanjali Organic Research Institute as well.

Genesis of AgriStack

The government of India embarked on the Digital India programme a few years ago with the aim of making India a “digitally empowered society and knowledge economy”. And one of the focus areas under this Digital India programme is agriculture. AgriStack aims to create a unified platform that gives them a digital ID linked to the Aadhar ID details.

This farmers’ ID will have a collection of important information relating to the farm, financial and personal details of the farmer. The need for such a digital database was felt primarily due to the fact that a large majority of India’s farmers are marginal and small farmers and do not have access to agriculture technology, financial help and even information related to crop management.

AgriStack is looking to deliver, among other things:

• Cattle monitoring support
• Soil analysis
• Credit information
• Yield forecasting
• Solutions across the agricultural value chain
• Better ways for price and market discovery

Concerns related to AgriStack

Like with almost all technological solutions today, AgriStack has sparked off debate on privacy and data protection. Safeguards, from a legal standpoint, are needed to protect the farmer and the land they till. There is ‘information asymmetry’ skewed in favour of the tech companies. With the farmer’s data being available on the cloud - the fear is that this data can be exploited by private / tech companies for commercial benefit.

Another area of concern is the financial power that AgriStack will give to institutions. There needs to be a framework of laws and rules that prevent the small and marginal farmer from being exploited with unfair rates of interest or wrong financial advice.

There is a lot of information about the farmers that is going to be shared under AgriStack - land ownership, loans, crop insurance and even productivity of the farm itself. It stands to logic therefore that the farmer will want assurances on safety of this information.

At the end of the day, AgriStack could indeed be a transformative tool for Indian agriculture but concerns on proper usage of this tool also need to be addressed extensively.