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(GIST OF KURUKSHETRA) Rural India’s innovation Pipeline

[May-2021]

In January 2020, for the first time in the 107-year history of the Indian Science Congress, a Farmers’ Science Congress was organised to celebrate and promote innovations emerging from Indian farms and village life.
The idea was to showcase the rural as a major source of innovation, as vital and important as the urban in India. Especially, since around two-third of the population and 70 percent of the workforce lives in rural areas.

The use of new technologies like artificial intelligence flows in, new ideas of combining a host of existing technologies to create a unified India Agricultural Platform (IAP) is emerging.
An IAP brings together all the benefits of artificial intelligence and data analytics to help “tactical and strategic decision making, leveraging multi-year, multi-source information, aggregated from the farms to state/national levels.
It processes huge data flows, and using tools like video, voice, vernacular translation, facilitate farmer engagement. The platform is hosted on a Cloud and reduces duplication by integrating data sources and a vast backend of new and existing applications: Government’s e-Nam, ITC’s e-Choupal, NCDEX’s NeML, APEDA’s TraceNet etc. related to logistics, weather, supply-chain, warehousing, assaying, recommendation engines, etc.

In essence, a platform like the IAP is likely to be the new frontier in fuelling rural innovation because it will transform the use of technology in agriculture like Aadhaar changed the identification process in the country, and UPI (united Payments Interface) transformed digital payments.
An IAP is likely to assist in everything from real-time purchase and sale of raw materials, produce and equipment, provide real-time relevant information such as weather patterns and track a timeline of the consumption and production history of the farmer, and make the cultivation process more data-driven and accurate.
Such a system would help farmers scale in a far more systematic fashion than current processes.