The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare has constituted a Task Force to develop a comprehensive Farmers’ Database for better planning, monitoring, strategy formulation and smooth implementation of schemes for the entire country.
The task force has been tasked to have a direct connectivity with over 11.5 crore farmers and their families across India, making it a communication exercise hitherto unprecedented in scale. If all goes well, the massive data bank on the farmers would be ready for release by June 2020.
According to information provided by the Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar in Lok Sabha on December 10, 2019, this centralized Farmers Database shall be useful for various activities like issuing soil health cards, dissemination of crop advisories to the farmers, precision farming, smart cards for farmers to facilitate e-governance, crop insurance, settlement of compensation claims, grant of agricultural subsidies, community/village resource centres etc.
At present, Centralised Farmers Database has not been created in the country. However, under PM-KISAN 90,165,852 number of farmers have been registered in the country as on 30.11.2019, out of which 5,813,813 number of farmers are registered in Rajasthan alone. As of now, data of 7.20 crore farmers have been collected under the PM KISAN scheme. From Uttar Pradesh alone, a data of 2.10 crore farmers have been included in the data bank.
By the middle of next year, the Modi government would have a direct connectivity with over 11.5 crore farmers and their families across India and the data bank on the farmers would be ready for release by June 2020. A top level committee, headed by Union Agriculture Secretary Sanjay Agarwal, is working in tandem with the Information and Technology Ministry and its National e-governance Division (NEGD) wing, to meet the deadline of the mega data project, set by the Prime Minister’s Office.
The government maintains that with the help of this database and use of technology, life of the small and marginal farmers of the country would witness a sea change. The data will empower the farmers as well as the state to access all financial and farming-related information, ranging from soil testing to flood alerts, and from satellite imagery to land revenue records.
The data bank would enable the farmer to have access to all sorts of market information. It is certainly going to be a game changer in the rural sector and a boon for farmers. It is learnt that besides the Agriculture Secretary, former IT Secretary J. Satyanarayana, the man behind implementation of Aadhaar card scheme, and a team of IT experts, is looking after the database project for farmers.
The team is working overtime to complete the task by June 2020. The data would also ensure that the money credited to a farmer’s bank account, reaches the right place. As of now the government has released 33,000 crore to the poor farmers under the PM KISAN scheme since the scheme was launched in December last year.
The Planning Commission of India has also created the databank on Agriculture sector with the sole purpose of making available all relevant statistics at one place for all kinds of users.
The data provides information about GDP from agriculture, gross capital formation in agriculture, pattern of land utilization, area under irrigation, state-wise land utilization, production of major crops, yield of principal crops and production of major crops etc. other inputs created in the data bank of Planning Commission include import and export of agricultural commodities, wholesale price index, net availability of food grains, live stock population in the country and all India consumption of fertilizers.
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