Tipped to be avant-garde, Agristack is considered a major initiative to digitally push Agriculture towards a new paradigm.
According to the highest civil officer of the J&K, it provides an ecosystem for facilitating delivery of various services to farmers.
With its successful implementation, a farmer would get access to the right advice at the right time regarding crop selection, crop health, selling of produce, access to inputs, loans and market besides benefits under different beneficiary oriented schemes for development of the sector.
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.
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 administration of late has made an 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.
While the Agristack appears to prove beneficial to farmers, the administration must work out all modalities to ensure its success.
