Agristack, a collection of technologies and digital databases proposed by the Central Government, focuses on farmers and the agricultural sector.
In order to create Agristack, the central agriculture department finalized the core concept of “India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)” which lays down a framework for Agristack.
For this, a Task Force was constituted and in furtherance, a concept paper on IDEA was prepared and comments were invited from subject experts, farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and general public.
As per the government, Agristack is a federated structure and ownership of data is with the States/UTs only.
Access to federated Farmers’ database is with the Government only and no private company is involved in developing the database. As of now, the federated database is being built by taking the publicly available data as existing in the Department and in various data silos in Government.
Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) for Proof of Concepts (PoCs) with various companies for development of use cases have been signed and accordingly carried out.
On Tuesday, December 13, Chief Secretary of J&K said that Agristack is a technology based information system with huge potential for the farming sector, covering nearly 70% of J&K’s population directly or indirectly.
Earlier the J&K government came up with the Aapki Zamin Aapki Nigrani concept towards transparency and digitization of land records. The Chief Secretary said that J&K would complete the digitization of cadastral maps and thereafter the Geo-referencing of the same for better implementation of Agristack.
The Agristack is tipped to become a basic tool of introduction of modern practices and is expected to give “extraordinary” results in terms of both the quality and quantity of the agriculture produce. It shall provide a unique ID to every farmer on one hand and information related to farm land on other.
The government of late has made endeavor to provide end to end digitization to farmers so that they do not have to look for different services and solutions at multiple places. The different interventions like digitization of land records, availability of expert opinions, farm practices guided by modern technology and techniques besides use of high yielding varieties of agricultural inputs can fructify the dream of doubling the farmers income in near future.
The Agristack is likely to provide agriculture information, financial services, as well as weather forecasts, knowledge sharing among farmers, transactional and access to government policies with greater ease and transparency. While the mission appears to prove beneficial to farmers, the government must workout all modalities to ensure its success.
