DPI for Agri Charcha

Digital Public Infrastructure for Agri Charcha

Prelude:

Indian agriculture faces several challenges, including low productivity, fragmented land holdings, lack of seamless market access, and impact of climate change. While the government has implemented various schemes – (E.g. - Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) for insurance coverage, and National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) to create a unified national market) and provided subsidies there are big gaps in the agriculture ecosystem and these schemes are not sufficient to address the challenges.

Digital Public Infrastructure and Digital Public Goods for Agriculture offer huge opportunities to transform the global Agri Food System, addressing critical concerns of climate change, inequity, and access as also affordability for nutritious food for millions of citizens. There is sufficient evidence of the transformative potential of agri value chain digitisation, as a natural extension from mechanised agriculture, as the foundation for future resiliency. Both, in its ability to reengineer exponential thought as well as establishing global scale and impact.

Against this background, Government of India aims to develop a “National AgriStack”, which will contribute towards increasing the income of farmers and improve efficiency of the sector. Union Finance Minister of India announced in the budget 2022-23 that Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in the country will be built in open-source using open standards and function as an interoperable public good. The adoption of a DPI based Agri Stack approach could result in approximately INR 5-7+ lakh crore benefit for farmers by 2030.

Disaggregate Building Blocks – leverage commonalities

The concept of open digital ecosystems in Agri is still evolving. There are hardly any standard frameworks for implementation, and will end up evolving over time. During the early stages, the needs may not be precisely documented and discovered over time. Therefore the traditional approach of developing monolith, complex systems does not work efficiently.

Digital ecosystems require non-linear, and non-traditional implementation approaches and substantial degrees of freedom to the private sector to ‘co-create’ public systems organically and iteratively over time. Architecture frameworks can be established based on three enablers- Policy Enabler, Technology Enabler and Market Enabler.

Without “context neutral” building blocks - DPGs and open datasets, digital agriculture products and services will be created by large multinational private sector firms as expensive, full stack implementations and therefore cater only to large farmers who can pay for such services. There are several attempts globally to build AgriStack or its elements, by players like Linux Foundation, ITC, UPL, GIZ etc), and we must attempt to integrate and leverage digital building blocks from these initiatives.

It is therefore imperative that we institutionalise collaboration and execution in digital agriculture – through establishing standards, global pilots & experiments, adopting a building block approach – (Digital Public Goods), removing inhibitors and encouraging international collaboration across technological, policy, and funding aspects.

Panel Discussion: Objective

In this panel, we seek a balanced discussion, bringing to life several aspects of digital public goods in Agriculture, leveraging the panellists’ experience, expertise, and perspectives, across agriculture, technology, policy, and sustainable development.

Through this, we hope to agree on some collective next steps, on our course toward a more inclusive, resilient, and efficient digital ecosystem for agriculture.

This discussion aims to delve deep into three aspects -

1. Identify some of the common issues that could be made into DPGs / DPIs - We know that a bulk of the effort, time and expense in building an Agri Tech Start-up is spent on duplicated efforts, working on issues and solving problems that others similarly struggle with. Often they don’t add competitive value. Can we with our domain expertise, try identify and prioritise some of these -- solving which can have exponential impact? A key promise of DPGs/ 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
2. Understand and learn from other experiments, esp India Stack - While DPIs and DPGs for Agri, are catching attention, let’s try and assimilate learnings from other experiences, experiments and sectors. Also, before co-creating Agri DPIs, we must reuse/repurpose functionality from DPIs built for other sectors including well established ones like Digi Locker, UPI, Aadhaar, as well as upcoming ones like ONDC, OCEN etc
3. Priorities to consider & Next Steps - 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 – but 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.

There is a need to adopt a farmer-centric approach, while solving complex Agri problems for long term sustainable impact while building DPIs – instead of a “technology first” approach. And ensuring that inclusivity, consent, privacy, etc are core to the design. And they remain that way.