Govt to bring out data policy for agriculture sector

New Delhi, July 20 (IANS) The government is in the process of bringing out a data policy for the agriculture sector, the Parliament was informed on Tuesday.

The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare has commenced work for creating 'Agristack', and for this, it is in the process of finalising the "India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)" which will lay down the framework, Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister Narendra Singh Tomar told Lok Sabha members K. Kanimozhi and Brijendra Singh in a written reply.

The government had constituted a task force and in furtherance, a concept paper on IDEA has been prepared and comments were invited from subject experts, farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and general public.

Tomar also said: "The government has not entered into any agreement with private companies for establishing Agristack. However, based on data which is already available in the public domain pertaining to several schemes of GoI and linking them with land records data, a federated farmers' database is being prepared."

Once completed, this would serve as the core of Agristack, he said.

"Some data from this is shared on selective basis with leading technology/agri-tech/start-upp companies to develop Proof of Concepts (PoCs). The collaboration is on pro-bono basis for a period of one year. The PoCs will help us understand the solutions that can be built using available data and some of them, if found beneficial to the farmers, will be scaled up at national level.

"As of now, the federated farmers' database is being built by taking the publicly available data as existing in various data silos in Government and no private data of the farmers is shared with any private organisation," Tomar said.