The Digital India program stands as a beacon of technological advancement and inclusive growth, offering immense potential to revolutionize the agricultural landscape of the nation. In the pursuit of enhancing farm productivity and income for farmers, the program leverages digital solutions to bridge informational gaps, streamline supply chains, and empower farmers with knowledge and resources. Through accessible technologies such as mobile applications, online marketplaces, and data analytics, farmers can make informed decisions regarding crop selection, irrigation practices, pest management, and market trends. Moreover, digital platforms facilitate direct engagement with buyers, cutting out intermediaries and ensuring fairer prices for agricultural produce.
In alignment with this vision, the government has taken proactive steps to integrate digital technologies into agricultural practices. Initiatives such as the e-NAM (National Agriculture Market) portal facilitate seamless electronic trading of agricultural commodities across various mandis (markets), promoting transparency and efficiency in the agricultural marketing system. Additionally, schemes like PM-KISAN leverage digital platforms for direct income support to farmers, enhancing their financial stability and incentivizing agricultural productivity. Through these concerted efforts, the Digital India program is poised to catalyze transformative change, empowering farmers to thrive in the digital age and contribute significantly to India’s agricultural prosperity.
Tag: E-technology to the aid of the farmers
Decoding the Question:
- In the introduction, try to write about the Digital India Programme.
- In body,
- Discuss how digital India helps farmers improve farm productivity and income
- Discuss steps taken by the government in this direction.
- In conclusion, try to write a way forward.
Answer:
The Digital India program aims to remove the digital illiteracy in India by ensuring every citizen has access to ICT. Digital India was launched in 2015 to create digital infrastructure for empowering rural communities and promoting digital literacy. Its 3 key pillars are Infrastructure as a Utility to Every Citizen, Governance and Services on Demand, and Digital Empowerment of Citizens.
Digital India’s Role to Improve Farm Productivity and Farmers’ Income:
- Virtual Ecosystem: Digital India is important to create a virtual ecosystem to support timely, localized information and services to farmers, making agriculture profitable and sustainable.
- Better Prices: The greatest impact of Digital India is on realizing better market pricing and reducing transaction costs. It has the potential to connect each farmer to anywhere in the country. This would help farmers to cut the cost of intermediaries.
- Tailored Recommendations: Digital technology can be the key to increasing agriculture productivity by delivering tailored recommendations to farmers based on crop sown, real-time observed weather, and projected market prices.
- Social Media: Digital India will also leverage social media platforms like Digital Green. Digital Green uses participatory videos about one farmer’s best management practices to other farmers. This approach is more cost-effective than traditional extension services as farmers trust other farmers.
- Direct Cash Transfer: The needy and poor farmers get Direct cash replacing agricultural subsidies. This would help increase agricultural productivity and reduce farmer’s debt burden. When combined with data infrastructure, subsidies can be validated and targeted to increase farm profitability which in turn gives farmers confidence to invest in their farms to further increase productivity.
- Savings: Mobile money is the intervention that has unlocked tremendous opportunities for rural consumers in Africa. Similarly, initiatives like PM Jan Dhan Yojana, Bhim, etc. can play an important role. Digital platforms allow farmers to bypass poor banking infrastructure support savings and access credit digitally.
- Land Reforms and Land Record Modernisation: Digitisation of land record and conclusive titling will solve the issues like insecurity of tenancy tenure, government schemes reaching to landless farmers etc.
Steps were taken by the government:
- The government has launched a national optical fiber network to connect all the panchayats of the country with high-speed broadband internet connection.
- The government has launched Agmarknet, a web-based portal where market, price and technology-related information are provided to farmers.
- The government has introduced schemes like the Kisan SMS portal and Sandesh Prathak, where automatic and free-of-cost information is provided to farmers in the local language and also it has provisions voice SMS for illiterate farmers.
- Soil Health Card portal was launched which serves as a single unified platform for registration of soil samples, recording test results of soil samples, and generation of Soil Health Card (SHC) along with Fertilizer Recommendations.
- The union government has launched the Participatory Guarantee System portal for certifying organic products by the standards laid down.
- NOWCAST weather alert system has been launched to provide free SMS service alerts on extreme weather conditions (hailstorms, etc.) to over one crore registered farmers on their mobile phones.
- Bharat Nirman is an effort to create and augment basic rural infrastructure. This plan aims to supply telecommunication facilities to remote areas of rural areas. It aims to increase the rural telecommunication facilities by 40%. Bharat Nirman has registered the increased teledensity in rural areas.
- National Mission On Agricultural Extension and Technology: The Mission aims to strengthen agricultural extension to enable the delivery of appropriate technology and improved agronomic practices to farmers. This is envisaged to be achieved by interactive methods of information dissemination, use of ICT, popularization of modern technologies, capacity building, etc.
There is much promise in digital applications to improve farmer livelihoods. Indian agriculture needs to be made more market-oriented through reform in existing policies, even as the government provides enabling environments for digital innovation. Rural connectivity is important for providing low-cost data and access to information. It would empower rural youth to realize their full potential and farmers to increase their profitability by accessing equitable markets.
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