Symposium on Data for Public Good

Harnessing the power of data for transforming agriculture

Prelude:

Agriculture is an incredibly complex sector, and one of the least digitized in India. 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.

Given its overall potential it is important for us to ensure an enabling framework for data, information and (domain) knowledge sharing to allow all players to succeed and grow. Additionally, the Agriculture sector is plagued by dozens of siloed software applications and islands of data, providing little benefit. Agriculture’s economic viability will improve via democratized and streamlined access to finance, advisory, supply chain and markets.

This value-chain is rapidly becoming digital, leading to an increasing amount of real-time data being generated - physical maps being digitized is one example, while another is the multiplicity of payment and Agri trading platforms and the rapid increase in “machine-data” generated by precision farming applications. This kind of domain and application integration, requires seamless data interoperability across the Agri eco-system, with due conformance to Data privacy and usage policies.

Currently there is a vacuum with respect to Agri Data standardization, calibration, and certification. Disaggregated and non-standardized data is deemed un-trustworthy and rendered ineffective for further processing. Standardization will help improve “data-trust” furthering automation using AI models, also avoiding real-world biases creeping into AI prediction.

It is generally agreed that we need to synthesize efforts across the Govt. and the Agri ecosystem towards an open, scalable, and integrated digital data stack. The National AgriStack under development can serve as a foundational layer, allowing data to interoperate across applications and sources - from farm sensors, satellites, drones, and the Government, flowing from farmer / farm to national levels. An Agri Data Exchange like ADeX as a platform can help reduce duplication by integrating data sources from a vast backend of new and existing applications: Govt’s eNam, ITC’s eChoupal, NCDEX’s NeML, APEDA’s TraceNet etc. related to logistics, weather, supply-chain, warehousing, assaying, recommendation engines, etc.

This mountain of data, once anonymised, aggregated, and processed can be re-purposed using AI, for different use cases, raising yields, optimising national resources, and doubling farmer income.

The Agri Data Exchange can harness this dataflow and facilitate “data partnerships” between Govt, Start-ups, Corporates, Research, Academia based on either direct or indirect business benefit. New innovative business models and partnerships will emerge across the value-chain (insurance, market access, assaying etc.) that help monetise data contributing to improved productivity and profitability of Agriculture and other sectors as well.

Progress will have to be step by step, given the complexity of Agriculture and several intersecting domains, e.g., Water, Weather, Chemicals, Space Satellites, etc. - efforts to standardize and calibrate Data sets must be broken down thematically (e.g., assaying, farmland surveying, Agri risk, credit scoring, weather forecasting, soil testing etc.) rather than generically across the sector.

Panel Discussion - Objective:

Under this larger objective we need to establish transparent rules on

1. Availability of Agri Data.

2. Private sector contribution to Agri Data; Governance, Protect business interests and Monetization.

3. Standardization, calibration, authentication of data to improve data trust.

4. Policy issues: consistent, cost effective Agri data sharing.

We seek a balanced discussion between issues around privacy, consent, and protection of farmers’ rights on data with providing economic benefit to the farmer by harnessing the power of data, bringing to life several ongoing efforts around Agri Data, leveraging the panellists’ experience, expertise, and perspectives, across agriculture, technology, policy, and sustainable development. We hope to agree on some collective next steps.

We will explore the topic led by the following, with everyone else participating as appropriate:

1. Data policies around availability and sharing: Ramadevi Lanka

2. Lack of data standardization and calibration: Timmana Gouda

3. Economic benefits – for extension services, including crowd sourced information and dissemination: Vineet Singh

4. Economic benefits – for customised and verified advisory services: Naveen Kumar V

5. Leveraging private sector data: All

6. Accelerating the use of ADeX for data rich agriculture: All