What Is AgriStack?
The government is working on a digital ‘stack’ of agricultural datasets, with its core as land records.
- But, such a centralised stack will use old and inaccurate land records; farmers’ personal and financial details will be used without a strong data protection law; and rural areas have a low level of digital literacy. Hence, experts say such an ‘AgriStack’ is problematic.
- The AgriStack is a collection of technologies and digital databases proposed by the Central Government focusing on India’s farmers and the agricultural sector.
- The central government has claimed that these new databases are being built to primarily tackle issues such as poor access to credit and wastage in the agricultural supply chain.
- Under AgriStack’, the government aims to provide ‘required data sets’ of farmers’ personal information to Microsoft to develop a farmer interface for ‘smart and well-organized agriculture’.
- The digital repository will aid precise targeting of subsidies, services and policies, the officials added.
- Under the programme, each farmer of the country will get what is being called an FID, or a farmers’ ID, linked to land records to uniquely identify them. India has 140 million operational farm-land holdings.
