Digital Agriculture Mission

• Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare signed 5 Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with private companies for taking forward Digital Agriculture.
• A Digital agriculture mission has been initiated for 2021 -2025 by the government for projects based on new technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, remote sensing and GIS technology, use of drones and robots etc.

What is Digital Agriculture Mission?

• Digital Agriculture is “ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and data ecosystems to support the development and delivery of timely, targeted information and services to make farming profitable and sustainable while delivering safe nutritious and affordable food for all.”
• Any attempt to transform the Agriculture sector needs to imbibe an ecosystem thinking and a digital ecosystem.
• The Agriculture value chain extends from crop selection to crop management and the market; it involves public and private players in agricultural inputs and services and also logistics.
• Establishing a digital ecosystem of agriculture needs to take a long-term view of aspects like interoperability, data governance, data quality, data standards, security and privacy, besides promoting innovation.
• A significant requirement is the adoption of a decentralized, federated architecture that assures autonomy to the service providers and all other actors and ensures interoperability at the same time.
• Recognizing the importance of Digitization in Agriculture the Department is creating a federated Farmers Database and building different Services around this Database so as to build Digital Ecosystems of Agriculture. A Federated farmers’ database will be linked to the land records of farmers from across the country and a unique Farmer ID will be created.
• Under this unified database for all farmers, the information of all benefits and supports of various schemes of Central & State governments can be kept and this can be the source for accessing information for providing benefits to farmers in the future. So far, the database is ready with details of around 5.5 crore farmers.

Click here to read India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)

India and Singapore to link UPI and PayNow

• The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Tuesday announced a project to link their respective fast payment systems — Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and PayNow — to facilitate instant, low-cost, cross-border fund transfers.
• The linkage is targeted to be operationalised by July 2022.
• “The UPI-PayNow linkage will enable users of each of the two fast-payment systems to make instant, low-cost fund transfers on a reciprocal basis without a need to get onboarded onto the other payment system,” the RBI said in a statement.
• UPI is India’s mobile-based, ‘fast-payment’ system that facilitates customers to make round-the-clock payments instantly using a virtual payment address created by the customer.
• PayNow is the fast payment system of Singapore that enables peer-to-peer fund-transfer services.