AgDx - Agri Digitalisation Framework

Context:

The agriculture sector faces a multitude of complex and interconnected challenges. Lack of access to modern technology, information, markets, and finance makes it difficult for small and marginal farmers to improve their productivity and profitability. These challenges are non-trivial and need a sustained push towards accelerating the digitalisation of agriculture. This will help improve productivity, streamline processes, crop selection, reduce wastage, use resource-efficient techniques and aid India, the second-largest food producer - balance food security with environmental protection. Digital agriculture in India has seen significant growth in recent years, driven by advancements in technology, and its market potential is projected to reach around $24 billion by 2025 with investments surging towards $ 500 M to $ 1 B annually. An ecosystem-led collaborative approach across stakeholders, including the State, Centre, Private, Public, and Research institutions, is necessary to allow digital technologies and processes play a key role as has been done in other sectors, such as leveraging UPI and UID.

Problem Statement:

Given the importance of digital agriculture, we need standardised frameworks, scorecards, and indices that can calibrate baselines, build roadmaps, and achieve the longer-term objectives of digitalising agricultural practices, products, and processes. None exist today. There is a big opportunity as well a critical need to reduce duplication, as Countries and States, Private and Public entities, Academia, Global foundations, and Non-Profits race to accelerate this push and increase the penetration of farmers leveraging digital agriculture from 15-20% to the 50% mark. (The World Bank estimates this as the current global and Indian penetration). Standardised benchmarks across geographies and crop value chains, have the potential to be leveraged by all of them to aid formulation of actionable road maps. The Agri Collaboratory, CGIAR and Institute for Competitiveness (IFC) are co-creating AgDx - a farmer-centric, first-of-its-kind Agri Digitalisation Framework, as a “public good”, to accelerate digitalisation of agriculture.

Objectives of AgDx

Build and publish a holistic multi-year framework - with a comprehensive set of digitalisation parameters, indicators, and sub-indicators that demonstrate the greatest propensity for impact on Agriculture, incorporating feedback from stakeholders, across the Public and Private sectors, Governments, Global foundations, and entrepreneurs. Build and publish scorecards and statistical indices - to assess and accelerate the penetration, maturity, and impact of Agri Digitalisation across Indian States & Crop value chains, using publicly available, qualitative and quantitative information, (and across countries in the future). Leverage AgDx - to enable data-led decision-making, build actionable pathways, and catalyze collaborative efforts across stakeholders to accelerate the digitalisation of agriculture and create a positive impact on Farmers.

AgDx - Agri Digitalisation Framework Composition and its development roadmap:

AgDx - The Agri Digitalisation Framework will ultimately be a holistic collection of a very large number of “Indicators” and “Sub-Indicators” each with a very high propensity to impact digital agriculture. They are logically classified under 15 “Parameters”, which in turn are grouped together into 6 “Framework Categories”. These have been selected based on intense consultation and feedback from Stakeholders and are being tested and compared with existing benchmarks to refine the methodology. AgDx will adopt a multi-year roadmap, updated annually, to ensure that the framework matures in its depth and breadth to cover all Indian States. It will use publicly available quantitative and qualitative data to ensure transparency and replicability, including information already collected and published by credible sources such as government reports, surveys, academic studies, research papers, etc. We will hold State level conferences between stakeholders (governments, industries, startups, academia) to enable information dissemination and help identify and address gaps in policy and infrastructure to accelerate digitalisation.

Impact:

AgDx aims to impact the end beneficiary - the Farmer, through its consumption by key users (governments, Indian & Global foundations, businesses and startups) and impacting them:

- Market Insights, opportunities, and targeted product development. - Attract investors and funding opportunities by aligning business with market trends. - Competitive advantage and market differentiation. - Enable long-term sustained impact via a top-down strategy. - International benchmarking, recognition, and innovation leadership. - Data-driven decision-making using a state performance dashboard.

Conclusion:

AgDx - the Agri digitalisation framework holds the long-term potential to revolutionize Indian agriculture making it more resilient, competitive and inclusive for its 140-160 m farmers and position it as a global leader in digital agriculture.

About us - AgDx’s co-creators:

The Agri Collaboratory (TAC): Is a “non-compete, not-for-profit, Agriculture Think and Do Tank” working to co-create privately provisioned Digital Public Goods for Agriculture with the Ecosystem and the Govt. by taking a use-case (problem-solving) approach. TAC’s core ethos and inspiration is that innovation in digital public infrastructure and open data will be a key catalyst for agricultural transformation. TAC partners and closely engages with global entities like CGIAR, Institute for Competitiveness, and The World Bank, academia like the Indian Institute of Sciences, PJTSAU; State Governments, and private entities like Samunnati, Kalgudi, Nuziveedu Seeds, Social Alpha.

Institute For Competitiveness (IFC): The Institute for Competitiveness, India is the Indian knot in the global network of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. Institute for Competitiveness, India studies competition and its implications for company strategy; the competitiveness of nations, regions & cities and thus generates guidelines for businesses and those in governance; and suggests & provides solutions for socio-economic problems.

CGIAR: CGIAR is the world’s largest global agricultural innovation network and a global research powerhouse working for 50+ years, in 89 countries through 15 research centers, 3000+ partners, working towards a food-secure future and dedicated to transforming food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis.