Business Today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Digital India on July 1, 2015 to create digital infrastructure for empowering rural communities, enabling digital delivery of services and promoting digital literacy. Given that 68 per cent of India’s population is rural and agriculture is the main source of livelihood for 58 per cent of the population, one must consider the role of Digital Agriculture within Digital India.

The Financial Express

There were genuine apprehensions about its impact on one of the largest sectors that employs about 50 % of the population. More so, since after two years of sluggish growth, agriculture had just made a turnaround with a growth forecast of at least 4% in 2016-17, even by conservative estimates.

The Economic Times

The agriculture ministry plans to use remote sensing technology to map the area under potato and onion cultivation for the entire country to provide an accurate estimate of the likely production of the respective crops. This would be extended to cover orchards in the next phase. “We are working on producing robust estimates of the area and production of important crops like potato and onion for the whole country through remote sensing,” said an agriculture ministry official.

Hindustan Times

But before it could capitalise on nature’s bounty, the demonetisation exercise delivered a body blow to agriculture and its allied sectors, which primarily deal in cash. The prices of vegetables — both at the wholesale and retail level — have crashed, leaving farmers, especially the small and marginal ones, in a perilous situation.

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There are drones, of V Drone Agro, flying over Bengaluru’s Ramanagara district helping farmers identify dying crops. Farmers in Telangana are using an app called Plantix, built by Progressive Environment and Agricultural Technologies, which helps in identifying plant diseases. Then there is Kisan Network (a Y Combinator company) in Madhya Pradesh, which works directly with the farmers to create standards in produce. They buy the produce from the farmers and assure them of market prices before they sell the produce to large corporates.