A collaborative national approach, open data interoperability, use-case led approach, governance, and farmer privacy is key.
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 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, etc. UPI and ONDC are examples of transformative cross-sectoral DPIs, and the building of an open, farmer-centric DPI is a key milestone in this journey.
Indian agriculture is highly heterogeneous and without a publicly 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 both – the small and marginal farmer and the long-tail of Agri start-ups from benefiting.
DPIs in agriculture, built in Public-Private Partnership mode, combining private innovation with this Government’s ability to drive transformation at mammoth scale can address issues of exclusion, making digital agriculture affordable and also encourage start-ups to proliferate and build businesses by addressing farmer expectations. More importantly, DPIs 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 – water, chemicals & fertilizers, finance, etc., Agriculture DPIs could be transformative for India.
We propose suggestions to consider while undertaking this mission, distilled from contributions by the Agri & Tech ecosystem (private sector, state governments, start-ups, global institutions, academia) during workshops organized by CGIAR and The Agri Collaboratory, last November and December at Delhi and Hyderabad.
1: Technology Recommendations:
a) Mobilising Open Data
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, enabling significant economic and sustainability benefits to the farmer and the nation.
b) Data Interoperability, Governance, and Portability
Agriculture has dozens of siloed and disaggregated datasets. Due to lack of standardization, 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.
c) Consent Manager & Data Exchange
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.
d) Digital Identities – Know Your Farmer (KYF)
On the lines of India Stack, attention should be paid to building an identity layer for the farmer. Like the “Know Your Customer”, “Know Your Farmer” (KYF) norms (including consent, registration, identity, and authentication) will be beneficial within the regulatory boundaries to make service delivery safer, efficient, and cost effective.
e) Digital Electronic Farm Record (EFR) – Know Your Farm
A digital public building block like EFR is an important step in building an Agri DPI, maintaining demographic information of the farmer and the topographical, annual information of the farmland including soil health, and crop yield. KYF and EFR should enable the inclusion of tenanted farmers and women farmers.
f) Disaggregate Building Blocks – leverage commonalities
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 Agri 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 suggest keeping some first principles in mind as we embark on this project.
2. Key principles
a) National collaborative approach across Centre and State
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 who ‘own’ agriculture in their portfolio. Instead of each state developing its own stack, creating disaggregated silos, there should be a collaborative national approach to DPI creation, agreed 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.
b) Focus on Use Cases
We suggest adopting a farmer-centric approach, while solving complex Agri problems for long term sustainable impact while building DPIs – instead of a “technology first” approach – with the use cases prioritized by the Government for maximum societal impact.
c) Reuse/Repurpose
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.
d) Agri Sandbox
A Sandbox is a “safe playground” – to test policies and technologies. An Agri Sandbox suitably designed can improve coworking across Centre and States and be a catalyst to prioritize and test DPIs with real data and synthesize the often conflicting regulatory and Innovation requirements.
Conclusions
DPI is very critical for transforming Indian agriculture. However, it must be a collaborative effort between multiple stakeholders including central and state governments, private sector and the start-up ecosystem. Basic principles of data interoperability, 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.
The Agri Collaboratory 