Progress in the agriculture value chain has a direct impact on a large proportion of the farming population in rural India. The digital revolution and the data being generated in agriculture are key to building a food system that is efficient, sustainable, and able to link farms to its consumers, in turn leading to higher farmer incomes.
The current digitisation of agriculture is driven by the ability to collect and analyse massive amounts of machine-readable data about every aspect of the value chain.
An equitable technology adoption is the key to help agri-digitisation. One of the first steps is the digitisation of land records that will help to create database linkages. Historically, land leasing laws in India have not enabled formal leasing contracts between the owner and the tenant. Surveys have indicated that most tenancy for small-hold farm lands is unofficial. As a result, tenants are often not identified as actual cultivators in the records. The lack of identification has had many implications.
The government’s intent towards building a federated farmers database, powered by such land records, existing financial schemes like the PM Fasal Bima Yojna, PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, and others is an effort to help public and private agencies in effective planning towards improving the efficiency of the agriculture sector as a whole and improve farmer incomes.
A digital database powered by data from land records can facilitate information on soil quality, geography-based climate conditions, and historic crop yield data. This can help to build end-to-end services across the agriculture value chain for farmers and then be used to offer technology-enabled solutions to maximise yield, based on weather and soil updates, input resources, market linkages, among other such services. This available data can help both public and private agencies in policy drafting, evaluating creditworthiness of agricultural borrowers and developing risk mitigation methods by accessing farmer-financial history, land ownership data, cropping yields.
In our roundtable on ‘The role of land digitization and data for farmer agri-worthiness’, our experts will discuss how technology can play a key role in agri fintech today, by identifying challenges and answering them through assimilating available data points, disrupting legacy systems, digitising agri-value chains to make them efficient, sustainable while driving farmer incomes. Co-presented by Cropin, ThinkAg and YourStory, the roundtable will be held on 20th April between 3-4 pm.
Our esteemed panellists include Mohit Pande, Chief Business Officer, Cropin; Prasanna Lohar, Vice President Technology, DCB Bank; and Suresh Venkatesan, Group Head, Information Technology at Samunnati Financial Intermediation and Services, who will be offering strategic insights on the revolution that agri-fintech is poised for.
To all leaders and stakeholders from the agritech value chain, this is your chance to be part of understanding the evolution of agri finance in India currently, participate in the discussion with your questions and insights, and collaborate with experts in the sector.
To join and live stream the event,