India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) (Critical Analysis)

The World Bank Group in its recent report highlighted the need for the agriculture sector to embrace digital technologies. In this regard, the government is in the process of finalising the 'India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)', which will lay down a framework for “Agristack”. It would serve as a foundation to build innovative agri-focused solutions by leveraging emerging technologies to contribute effectively to create a better ecosystem for agriculture in India.

It will help the government in:

- Increasing farmers’ income:

• Localized solutions and tailored recommendations to the farmers as per their needs will enable accurate and smart farming and will enhance their productivity and profitability.
• Integration with the market economy may result in better realization of prices to farmers by eliminating intermediaries.
• Reducing the gap between farmers and consumers will benefit both farmers (better prices for food grains) and consumers (low cost of food items).

- Improving efficiency of the agriculture sector:

• Creation of the farmers’ IDs would enable ‘single sign-on’ for access to all government services offered to farmers, which will subsequently improve delivery of services.
• Ensuring synchronisation between various planning and execution of policies, programmes, and schemes of the Central and State governments, and also of the private sector and Farmers Producer Organizations (FPOs) will play a major role in improving efficiency of the agriculture sector.
• Access to high-quality data will further promote R&D and innovation in agriculture.
• Involvement of private players will bring in expertise in the sector. For instance, an MoU with Patanjali to develop a mobile application for advising farmers on soil nutrition, accurate quantification on farmer crop and yield, fertilizer recommendations, and training farmers.

Associated Concerns:

• Issue of data privacy and consent: This may result in exploitation of farmers’ data by private players, especially in the absence of a data protection legislation.
• Commercialization of agriculture extension activities: There is a concern that agristack is the precursor to complete privatisation of government services extended to agriculture and the private companies may charge exorbitant prices for these services.
• Poor implementation of the digital land records programmes: Some states have not implemented digitization of land programmes and some others have implemented them only partially.
• Risk of commodifying agriculture and farmer data: Agristack could strengthen the asymmetry in information flow by providing all information about farmers and their farming easily to corporations. For instance, supply of data to corporations who looked at farmers as a consumer base for their agri inputs like seed, chemical fertiliser and pesticides, etc.
• Digital divide: There is a digital divide in rural India both in terms of ‘access’ and ‘digital education’ of the farmers. 
• Exclusion of landless cultivators: As they do not have digital land records, it will result in their exclusion.
• Issue of women farmers: They will face problems as majority of the land titles continue to be held by men.

Faced with these concerns, measures like creation of adequate privacy and data security infrastructure to ensure protection of farmers’ data, educating farmers to bridge information asymmetry and digital divide through schemes like PM Grameen Digital Saksharata Abhiyan (PMGDISHA), including experts and representatives of farmers to ensure inclusive and accommodative policies etc. can be adopted to fulfill aspirations like doubling farmer’s income and achieving related SDGs.