Major Achievements

The Department is positioning itself to take the lead in developing a commercial model for the Indian farmer and her farming needs by setting up "FarmerZone”, a cloud-service with curated data. This data caters to all needs of the farmer--from dealing with climate change, weather predictions to problems faced by the farmer on matters of land, soil, disease, pest, water, planting material and marketing. This would be a multi-purpose window for solutions and will be available for farmers anywhere in India and probably the world. Solutions will be provided at the farm, like how an e-commerce company delivers its service at the customer’s doorstep. The farmer can access the service directly or through an intermediate structure such as local cooperatives. The FarmerZone will include a MarketZone where farmers can directly sell their produce which can be picked up by directly from the farm. An international conclave was organized by DBT during 30-31st of August 2017 where, in addition to farmers, experts in science and technology, world agri-leaders and policy makers and global companies who work in big-data and e-commerce segments participated. The conclave debated on: 1) Capturing and curating agriculture related data. 2) Applying data analytics and machine learning to problems faced in small and marginal farm holdings. 3) Using the above to provide solutions in resource-constrained farming conditions and in the context of climate-change challenges. 4) Roadmap/action plan for setting up the cloud service is being developed, and is expected to be ready by the end of this year. 5) Two sentinel sites -- one for potato farmers and the other for rice farmers will be initiated in three months’ time.