The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare has answered a few questions (Lok Sabha untarred question no.2504) related to Agri Stack. Questions include- whether the Ministry is working on Agri Stack (a digital database of farmers)? Did government conduct public consultations regarding Agri Stack? and What is the current status of the Scheme?
While answering these questions, the Ministry told that it has constituted a Task Force for the development of Indian Enterprise Architecture Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA). This IDEA will function as the base for the Unified Farmers Service Platform (UFSP). But the Government has not decided the components of the IDEA.
A Digital BluePrint for the Agri Stack is ready. The building of UFSP and appointment of relevant organizations will be done once the framework is approved by the Ministry.
What is Agri Stack?
“Digital Agri stack” for farmers is a program in which government will create a farmer’s database to facilitate insights related to the rural economy for government and agribusinesses. To implement this government will allot a unique ID to each farmer which will be called as Farmer’s ID (FID). This ID will be linked with land records and help in uniquely identify them. This database is built under the National e-Governance Plan in Agriculture.
What is UFSP?
UFSP will help digitize agricultural service delivery by public and private sectors. This database will contain information related to the details of land of the farmer, what they grow and in which agro-climatic zones they fall. In accordance with this information, the application of Agri Stack will provide insights related to rural economy to the farmers.
According to the officials, this database will help the farmers to avail the subsidiaries, government policies, cheap insurance, fertilisers, credit and income transfers. Also, This will address all the loopholes in the system such as lack of information and corruption by intermediaries.
An official told Hindustan Times that “The data of 4.3 crores (43 million) farmers linked with land records have already been verified and the database will be unveiled shortly”. The database uses Aadhaar based data generated from key farm sector programmes such as PM-KISAN.
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