Amazon.com Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., ESRI India Technologies and Microsoft Corp., are among the technology firms that have signed preliminary agreements with Prime Minister Modi’s administration to harness data from India’s farmers.
Jio Platforms Ltd., ITC Ltd. and Star Agribazaar Technology, are some of the India-based companies that have signed up for the program.
In an ambitious government-led productivity drive aimed at transforming India’s agricultural industry, the program seeks to share farm statistics the government has been gathering since coming to power in 2014. The aim is to rope in the private sector to help farmers boost yields with apps and tools built from information such as crop output, soil quality and land holdings.
The idea is simple: Seed all the information such as crop pattern, soil health, insurance, credit, and weather patterns into a single database and then analyze it through AI and data analytics. Then the goal is to develop personalized services for a sector replete with challenges such as peaking yields, water stress, degrading soil and lack of infrastructure including temperature-controlled warehouses and refrigerated trucks.
Modi is seeking to usher in long-due reforms to make over a farm sector that employs almost half of the nation’s 1.3 billion people, and contributes about a fifth of Asia’s third-biggest economy. The government is counting on the project’s success to boost rural incomes, cut imports, reduce some of the world’s worst food wastage with better infrastructure, and eventually compete with exporters such as Brazil, the U.S. and the European Union.
Microsoft has selected 100 villages to deploy AI and machine learning and build a platform. Amazon, which has already started offering real-time advice and information to farmers through a mobile app, is offering cloud services to solution providers. Star Agribazaar, will collect data on agri land profiling, crop estimation, soil degradation and weather patterns. ESRI India is using geographic information system to generate data and create applications.
“Once you have the data, you can correlate with on-ground reality and improve your projections, take informed decisions, and see which regions need policy intervention,” said P.K. Joshi, former director for South Asia at Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
