Nipun Mehrotra & Ram K Dhulipala
In her Budget speech, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated, “A digital public infrastructure for agriculture will be built as an open source, open standard and interoperable public good that will help develop farmer-centric solution for crop planning, crop estimation, market intelligence, and support for the growth of agri-tech industry and start-ups”. Much has been written on the transformative scope of digital agriculture, be it in improving sustainability, access to finance, inputs and markets, contextual advisory, and so on. UPI and ONDC are examples of transformative cross-sectoral digital public infrastructure (DPI), and the building of an open, farmer-centric DPI is a key milestone in this journey.
Indian agriculture is highly heterogeneous, and without a public-funded DPI, digital agriculture is justifiably criticised for catering to large farmers with an ability to pay and large agri-tech players with deep pockets building monolithic platforms. This excludes the small and marginal farmer and the agri start-ups. DPIs in agriculture, built in the public-private partnership mode, combining private innovation with this government’s ability to drive transformation at a mammoth scale, can address issues of exclusion, make digital agriculture affordable, and also encourage start-ups to proliferate and build businesses by addressing farmers’ expectations. More importantly, DPI in agriculture will enhance the efficiency of various budget initiatives by closing the promise-delivery gap in public service systems. Since agriculture intersects with most other sectors like water, chemicals and fertilisers, and finance, agriculture DPIs could be transformative for India. We propose suggestions to consider while undertaking this mission, distilled from contributions by the agriculture and tech ecosystem.
For the technology recommendations, first, mobilising open data is important. Open data accelerates digital innovation across the food-land-water systems value chain and unlocks the economic potential of agriculture through the enhanced availability, aggregation, sharing and monetisation of government and private datasets, and enables significant economic and sustainability benefits to the farmer and the nation.
Second, agriculture has dozens of siloed and disaggregated datasets. Due to the lack of standardisation, calibration, and certification, most are ineffective for use. Establishing sound data interoperability policies and data governance principles are of utmost importance to improve “data-trust” and farmer adoption. Enabling “data portability” protects farmer interests when switching service providers.
Third, consent managers are operational for fintech and can be emulated, keeping in mind specific requirements of agriculture to reduce uncertainty and misuse while sharing farmer data. Similarly, a national Agri Data Exchange will create a homogenous, monetised, and well-governed data marketplace.
Fourth, on the lines of India Stack, attention should be paid to building an identity layer for the farmer. Like Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Farmer (KYF) norms (including consent, registration, identity, and authentication) will be beneficial within the regulatory boundaries to make service delivery safer, more efficient, and cost-effective.
Fifth, a digital public building block like an electronic farm record (EFR) is an important step in building an agri DPI, maintaining demographic information of the farmer and the topographical and annual information of the farmland, including soil health and crop yield. KYF and EFR should enable the inclusion of tenanted farmers and women farmers.
Lastly, a key promise of DPIs is cost reduction and quicker farmer benefits through their reusability across services. By building the functionality once, it is reused for several use cases. KYF, for example, is required for finance, advisory, market, and supply chain linkages in agriculture and beyond in health and social services, thus providing exponential benefits.
While DPIs are transformative, building them takes years, hard work, and a lot of patience. We have a few key principles to suggest as this project is undertaken. First, by design, DPIs must be co-created with the broader private/social ecosystem, going well beyond joint presence in governmental committees through inclusive, “non-compete” spaces and entrepreneur-friendly policies for governance and frictionless collaboration. It is very important to involve states that ‘own’ agriculture in their portfolio. Instead of each state developing its own stack, and creating disaggregated silos, there should be a collaborative national approach to DPI creation, agreed upon by all states and political parties. Chances of buy-in from smallholder farmers exponentially increase when we involve local communities, intermediaries (such as farmer cooperatives and NGOs), and start-ups while co-creating and implementing DPIs.
Second, it is suggested that a farmer-centric approach is adopted, while complex agricultural problems for long-term sustainable impact are solved while building DPIs instead of a “technology-first” approach, with the use cases prioritised by the government for maximum societal impact.
Third, before building agri DPIs, we must reuse/repurpose functionality and DPIs built for other sectors, including well-established ones like Digi Locker, UPI, Aadhaar, as well as upcoming ones like ONDC, OCEN, etc.
Lastly, a sandbox for the agri-DPI must be created. A sandbox is a “safe playground” to test policies and technologies. An agri sandbox that is suitably designed can improve coworking across the Centre and states and be a catalyst to prioritise and test DPIs with real data and synthesise the often conflicting regulatory and innovation requirements.
DPI is very critical for transforming Indian agriculture. However, it must be a collaborative effort between multiple stakeholders, including central and state governments, the private sector, and the start-up ecosystem. Basic principles of data interoperability, and data governance, including data privacy and security, must be the basis of architecting the DPI. This is the right time to go for a comprehensive strategy towards this objective.
(Respectively, co-founder & CEO of The Agri Collaboratory, and senior scientist, CGIAR)