On June 1, 2021, the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmer Welfare released a Consultation Paper on Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA).
Digital technologies are transforming all the sectors of the economy and the society in innumerable ways. Communications, banking, payments, travel, energy, healthcare, taxation, and governance have significantly benefited by deploying digital solutions. Agriculture and allied sectors call for ‘doing more with less’ if the challenges depicted above are to be overcome effectively or more so converted into opportunities to leapfrog. In a recent report the World Bank Group has underpinned the need for the agriculture sector to embrace digital technologies. ‘The digital revolution—and the data it generates—are key to building an agriculture and food system that is efficient, environmentally sustainable, equitable, and able to link the world’s 570 million farms with 8 billion consumers’.
Against the above backdrop, the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmer Welfare (DoAC&FW), Government of India (GoI) constituted a Task Force (TF) and a Working Group (WG) consisting of domain experts and technology experts to design a blueprint for digital agriculture. The TF co-chaired by Sri Sanjay Agarwal, Secretary MoAC&FW and Sri J Satyanarayana, former Secretary MeitY, GoI and coordinated by Sri Vivek Aggarwal Additional Secretary DoAC&FW, met 8 times during 2019-21.
The TF and the WG realized quite early that an ecosystem approach was the only way forward to address the agriculture sector holistically. Moreover, it was felt appropriate to draw from the national architecture principles and patterns designed by the Ministry of Electronics and IT, especially the India Digital Ecosystem Architecture (InDEA). Accordingly, the initiative was named IDEA (‘InDEA Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture’).
The Ministry aspires that the IDEA initiative would place the farmer in the centre of the agriculture ecosystem leveraging open digital technologies.
