Agri Stack to cover six crore farmers by end of the year

Agri Stack – a database of farmers in India with details like their agriculture landholding, GPS coordinates of each plot and crops grown on them – will cover 60 million farmers by the end of this financial year, an agriculture ministry official said.

A unique farmer identification number, or ID, will be provided to each farmer and the database will have linkages to the government benefits availed by farmers. A Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI) will be the application programming interface or the service layer to provide data to others.

“Agri Stack is ‘Aadhaar plus’ for the Indian agriculture ecosystem,” Rajeev Chawla, strategic advisor and chief knowledge officer at the Union agriculture and farmer welfare ministry, told ET.


He said 60 million farmer IDs will be given by the end of this financial year. “We already know 100 million farmers who avail the PM Kisan scheme. We have created farmer IDs for them in advance but have not activated them,” he said.

Use cases for the Agri Stack include availing the Kisan credit card in which loans can be acquired in 15 minutes.

Chawla said the farmer IDs will be activated only when the farmer will register on the farmer registry.

During a recent pilot in two districts – Beed in Maharashtra and Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh – camps were held where farmers who visited got their IDs created.

“There are another 50 million people for whom we will create farmer IDs on the fly with the help of their Aadhaar,” Chawla said.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech on Tuesday had said, “Buoyed by the success of the pilot project, our government, in partnership with the states, will facilitate the implementation of DPI (digital public infrastructure) in agriculture for coverage of farmers and their lands in three years.”

A digital crop survey for Kharif using DPI will be taken up in 400 districts in the current fiscal, she had said.

The details of 60 million farmers and their lands will be brought into the farmer and land registries this fiscal. Also, issuance of Jan Samarth-based Kisan credit cards will be enabled in five states.

In last year’s budget, it had been said that in agriculture, geo-referencing has been completed for 75% of the villages in the country.

A digital crop survey has been launched on a pilot basis in 12 states. In addition, support registries such as crop registries, an agri data exchange, a consent manager, a sand box, and a UFSI have also been developed.

“Agriculture knowledge is highly local and contextual. We have hundreds of agriculture research institutes, coordination institutes, people working in the seeds sector, fertiliser sector, and many others who create knowledge,” Pramod Varma, former architect of Aadhaar, told ET. “Unfortunately, they don’t translate to the last mile, to the farmer, in a usable way.”

Local language and technology barriers don’t let farmers access the vast agriculture knowledge, which remains highly fragmented and currently not leverageable, he said.

“So, the commitment by the government to build agri DPIs via a set of electronic registries and open networks facilitating knowledge and commerce exchange at the fingertips of the farmer, is commendable,” Varma said.

Vijay Vujjini, chief technology officer of the Centre for DPI at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B), said he had helped the team develop the UFSI with a few technical interventions in design.

“The scope of the UFSI initiative is enabling sharing data from trusted registries namely, farmer, land, and crop registries in agriculture space,” he told ET. “The architecture enables user consent-driven data exchange from different registries under state government control with private and government ecosystem to empower the user with easy access to credit, and social benefits,” Vujjini said.