By the middle of next year, the Modi government would have 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.
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.
With the help of this database and the 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, once ready by the next six months, 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,” a senior official of the Union Agriculture and Farmers Affairs Ministry told IANS adding that “besides the Agriculture Secretary, former IT Secretary J. Satyanarayana, the man behind implementation of Aadhar card scheme, and several IT experts, are looking after the database project”.
Prime Minister Modi’s dream project PM-KISAN (Kisan Samman Nidhi), which aims at providing assistance of Rs 6,000 to each farmer every year, seems to be a source of inspiration for gathering such mammoth data from across the country. 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.
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