Whither digital agriculture in India?
Rupak Goswami A , Sudarshan Dutta
B C I * , Sanchayeeta Misra A , Shubhadip Dasgupta D E , Somsubhra Chakraborty D , Kousik Mallick A , Aditya Sinha F , Vinod K. Singh G , Thomas Oberthür B C , Simon Cook H and Kaushik Majumdar B C
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Faculty Center for Integrated Rural Development and Management (IRDM), Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute, Narendrapur 700103, West Bengal, India.
B African Plant Nutrition Institute, Benguerir 43150, Morocco.
C Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Benguerir 43150, Morocco.
D Agricultural and Food Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, West Bengal, India.
E Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Mohanpur, Nadia 741252, West Bengal, India.
F Department of Extension Education, Bihar Agricultural University, Sabour 813210, Bihar, India.
G ICAR - Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA), Hyderabad, Telangana 500059, India.
H College of Science, Health, Engineering and Education, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA, Australia.
I Present address: Nature Based Solutions (Agriculture), Kosher Climate, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
Crop & Pasture Science - https://doi.org/10.1071/CP21624
Submitted: 11 August 2021 Accepted: 15 December 2022 Published online: 8 March 2023
© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing
Abstract
Agriculture is central to the Indian economy and suffers from widespread operational inefficiencies that could be corrected by the use of digital agriculture technologies (DA). We review and synthesise available literature concerning digital agriculture in India and anticipate its transformative potential in the coming decade. Although the initial growth of DA was more conspicuous in the downstream sectors and high-value crops, reaching smallholder farmers upstream is slowly emerging despite significant obstacles such as small fragmented holdings, inadequate data infrastructure and public policy, and unequal access to digital infrastructure. Agri-tech enables innovation at many locations within value chains, and a steady shift is occurring in change from individual farms to the whole value chain. Technology in the sector is progressing from information and communication technology-based solutions to Internet of Things and artificial intelligence–machine learning-enabled services. India’s public policy shows signs of a longstanding investment and collaboration in the sector, with an explicit focus on data infrastructure development. We find smallholder predominance, diversity in production systems, the predominance of commodity crops, proximity to urban markets, and public policy as the major factors of DA’s success in India. A stocktake of the available technologies and their applications by the public sector, tech giants, information technology leaders and agri-food tech startups in India strongly indicates a digital transformation of Indian agriculture. However, given the federal structure of governance and agriculture being a state (province) subject, we need to wait to see how DA policies are rolled out and taken up across the country.
Keywords: agri-startup, artificial intelligence–machine learning, data infrastructure, data policy, digital technologies, factors of adoption, proximal sensing, smallholder systems.
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