Agri Stack

Agri Stack is the digital foundation being set up by the government to enable rollout of data centric digital services to improve Indian agriculture and enable farmer empowerment. It is an effort to bring together high-quality data and to make this data easily available to the stakeholders that need it so that they can create new services using the data.

Implementation agency

Agri Stack is being implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare at the Centre in close collaboration with the Revenue and Agriculture departments of State governments.

Objectives of Agri Stack

• Improve Government benefits/schemes delivery so they reach all Indian farmers faster and more easily
• Create a presence-less layer for quick identification and authentication of the farmers
• Lower the cost and risk of agricultural services for farmers and agri-credit, finance, inputs, and other service providers
• Enabler easier scheme convergence between agri-allied Ministries and State Governments to better serve the Indian Farmers
• Accelerate innovation in products & services by Agri-Techs with easier access to high-quality data

Envisaged benefits of Agri Stack

Agri Stack is an infrastructure and foundational layer that enables various government and private entities to provide farmers with tailored services by providing them access to high-quality, validated, attested and current data. Thus, Agri Stack will:

• Provide the right support to farmers in terms of finance and agricultural inputs at the right time
• Provide localized and tailored Early Warning Systems for disasters including pest attacks, droughts, floods, etc.
• Simplify government scheme benefits lifecycle for farmers.
• Enable quick and easy access to affordable finance.
• Enable private participation in farmer service delivery, thereby increasing farmers' choices.
• Enable ease of governance by providing required data at the right place for enhanced decision making, policy implementation, and feedback management.
• Improve targeting of government benefits (by maximizing inclusion and minimizing exclusion and fraud).

Building blocks of Agri Stack

Farmer and farmland registries

• At the center of Agri Stack is a Farmer Registry a federated registry of all the farmers in the country, compiled by States according to common standards, and cached by the Centre.
• Each farmer will be assigned a unique FarmerID (a functional ID, based on Aadhaar as per IndEA 2.0) and a digitally verifiable credential.
• The Farmer Registry will be dynamically linked to their farmland plot records for non-legal, planning and advisory, and scheme-delivery purposes only.
• These registries will form the foundation for quick, efficient, and transparent service and scheme delivery by the Government of India State Governments and other public entities. It will contain the minimal demographic details of the farmer to enable identification and eligibility determination for availing scheme benefits.

Unified Farmer Service Interface

• Unified Farmer Service Interface is the building block that enables interoperability across stakeholders in Agri Stack.
• It comprises a standardized schema and AΑΡΙ definitions, along with their various associated specifications.
• UFSI is envisioned to be used by government and authorized private users, such as Banks, Agri-Techs, agriculture value- chain companies, etc. UFSI will enable a center-state federation of data, authorized and consent- brokered access to the core registries' data, and standards- based interactions between various public and private stakeholders.

Crop sown Registry

• The Crop Sown Registry is designed to be a federated registry of crops being sown and grown across the country every season, on every farm by each farmer.
• It aims to streamline and improve previously prevalent paper-based methods of surveying crops by introducing smartphone and image-based (including drone and satellite images in the future), more fool-proof methods of crop survey.
• The Crop Sown registry, along with the Farmer and Farmland Plot Registries, forms part of the initial set of core central registries. It enables the State and Central governments to estimate crop production quicker and more accurately, better understand and be more responsive to the actual crop being grown in the country, and plan interventions and support to help address the crop-specific issues. It can also enable government and private service providers to better target schemes, services, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery, advice, credit, etc. customized to a farmer's individual needs.

Agri Stack Sandbox

The Agri Stack Sandbox is a subset of the Agri Stack that will provide a simulated environment with access to the Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI) along with sample data for the various registries and databases, to authorized stakeholders to allow them to test and safely fail, or succeed and get fully authorized access to the production environments. 

Consent Manager

The Agri Stack Consent Manager, which provides the foundation for data privacy, is initially designed around the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) framework and will evolve as the data privacy regulations are formally legislated. The Consent Manager facilitates data-blind sharing of personal data only with persons/entities for whom the data principal (i.e., a farmer) has provided consent. Consent once given, may also be revoked, preventing future sharing of data.

Source : Agri Stack portal