Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers welfare signs 5 MOUs with private companies for taking forward Digital Agriculture

What is the News?

Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has signed five Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with private corporations to advance digital agriculture.

What is Digital Agriculture?

Digital agriculture is the use of new and advanced technologies, integrated into one system, to enable farmers and other stakeholders within the agriculture value chain to improve food production.

Digital agriculture has the potential to make agriculture more productive, more consistent and to use time and resources more efficiently. 

About Digital Agriculture mission

Launched by: Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare 

Aim: To achieve rapid development in the Indian Agriculture Sector through the use of the latest technologies. These include technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, remote sensing and Geographic information systems technology (GIS), usage of drones and robotics.

Duration of the mission: 2021 -2025.

About Farmers Database

For better planning, monitoring, policymaking, strategy formulation and smooth implementation of schemes for the farmers, a nationwide Farmer’s Database linked with land records is being created with the following objective:

• Develop a nationwide database of farmers 
• Keep a record of unique farmers. 
• Unique farmer ID (FID) to uniquely identify a farmer 
• To know benefits availed by a farmer under various schemes

This Centralized Farmers Database shall be useful for various activities like issuing soil health cards, dissemination of crop advisories to the farmers, precision farming, smart cards for farmers to facilitate e-governance, crop insurance, settlement of compensation- claims, grant of agricultural subsidies, community/village resource centres etc.  

So far, the database is ready with details of around 5.5 crore farmers.

Source: This post is based on the article “Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers welfare signs 5 MOUs with private companies for taking forward Digital Agriculture” published in PIB on 14th September 2021