Union govt holding off on making enrolment a must
NEW DELHI: The Union government is holding off on a decision to make it mandatory for farmers to enrol in a sprawling digitised agricultural ecosystem being built to connect farm services companies and cultivators following privacy concerns expressed by farm unions.
The government is currently involved in a series of discussions with experts around privacy and data protection to take a view on enrolment of farmers in the digital infrastructure that will hold critical economic data – from land records to farming patterns – potentially worth thousands of crores of rupees, said officials. “It is unlikely that farmers will be forced to join in. They will have a choice,” one of the officials added, asking not to be named.
The agriculture ministry is, however, speedily moving to create a core digital base for the farm economy, which supports half of all Indians, with currently available public data.
The ministry is in the process of “finalising an India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)”, which lays down a framework for building Agristacks, which are channels of data related to farmers, according to a second official.
Such a move will help the government in better planning, raise farmers’ income, and bring efficiency to the sector dominated by poor smallholding peasants, agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar said in Parliament on Tuesday.
Farm unions have been deeply sceptical of the government’s farm policies. In December, ahead of crucial elections in states, Centre cancelled three controversial farm laws that had sparked protests by hundreds of thousands of farmers.
The unions have also rejected policies announced in the recent Union Budget to harness startups, drones and digital tools to spur farm incomes, demanding instead a law to guarantee assured minimum support prices (MSP) for their produce. “What will drones do? How will farmers afford drones when farmers don’t get even minimum prices?” said Hannan Mollah, a leader of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM).
Digital repository
In September 2021, the agriculture ministry signed agreements with five private firms to push its project to harness big data from the farm sector for the digital ecosystem, a move the government hopes will bring new technologies and greater private investment.
The digital repository aims to aid precise targeting of subsidies, services and policies. The database will assign each farmer of the country what is being called a FID, or a farmers’ ID, linked to land records to uniquely identify them. India has 140 million operational farm-land holdings.
The hi-tech database will be available publicly with the idea of giving agribusinesses unprecedented insights into the rural economy and even individual land parcels, allowing them to target farmers with customised products.
Officials said the database will connect seemingly simple data points: the number of occupational farmers, how much land they own and where, what they grow and which agroclimatic zones they fall in.
The next step will be to create a model to monetise the data, he added.