The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare on 3rd December 2021 has taken various initiatives/steps to enable digitalisation of agricultural sector in the country and to promote agri-tech business.
The government of India has launched National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) Scheme with the objective of creating online transparent competitive bidding system to facilitate farmers with remunerative prices for their produce.
The Government has finalized an India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) framework which would lay down the architecture for the federated farmers’ database is being built by taking the publicly available data as existing in various schemes and linking them with the digitized land records. The idea would serve as a foundation to build innovative agri-focused solutions leveraging emerging technologies to contribute effectively in creating a better Ecosystem for Agriculture in India.
Further, Technology/Agritech/StartUp companies were identified and invited to collaborate with the Government of lndia and develop Proof of Concepts (PoC) based on the federated Farmers’ database. A public notice through the Department’s website was also issued inviting proposals for MoU. Companies were invited to sign MoU on purely pro bono basis for a period of one year and develop PoCs. The PoCs will help in understanding solutions that can be built using available data and some of them, if found beneficial to the farmers will be scaled up at National level.
Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal (ICAR-CIAE) under Indian Council of Agricultural Research(ICAR) has developed Krishi Yantra App to augment research, operations and technology dissemination process in the field of agricultural engineering. Besides, ICAR-CIAE has also developed the following Mobile Apps:
- ‘Farm mech’ App: The App is related to decision support for selection of suitable farm machineries for five major crops of Tamil Nadu. It also has dynamic Networking of 2250 Custom hiring service operators in Android platform.
- ‘Farm Safety’: Provides information about Safety Guidelines and Safety Gadgets to avoid accidents while using different type of agricultural machinery.
- Water Balance Simulation Model for Roof Water Harvesting (Mobile App): It is helpful to decision makers to make recommendations for design requirements where roof water harvesting system adoption may lead to water saving and water security.
