What is the Agri-Stack Scheme?

About Agri-Stack Scheme:

• It is the digital foundation being set up by the government to enable the rollout of data-centric digital services to improve Indian agriculture and enable farmer empowerment.
• It integrates farmer data, land records, and scheme benefits into a centralized digital platform.
• It is being implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer Welfare at the Centre in close collaboration with the Revenue and Agriculture departments of State governments.
• It is an infrastructure and foundational layer that enables various government and private entities to provide farmers with tailored services by providing them access to high-quality, validated, attested, and current data. Thus, Agri Stack will:
• • Provide the right support to farmers in terms of finance and agricultural inputs at the right time.
  • Provide localized and tailored early warning systems for disasters, including pest attacks, droughts, floods, etc.
  • Simplify government scheme benefits lifecycle for farmers.
  • Enable quick and easy access to affordable finance.
  • Enable private participation in farmer service delivery, thereby increasing farmers' choices.
  • Enable ease of governance by providing required data at the right place for enhanced decision-making, policy implementation, and feedback management.
  • Improve targeting of government benefits (by maximizing inclusion and minimizing exclusion and fraud).
• Building Blocks of Agri Stack:
• Farmer and Farmland Registries:
  • At the center of Agri Stack is a Farmer Registry, a federated registry of all the farmers in the country, compiled by States according to common standards, and cached by the Centre.
  • Each farmer will be assigned a unique FarmerID (a functional ID, based on Aadhaar as per IndEA 2.0) and a digitally verifiable credential.
  • The Farmer Registry will be dynamically linked to their farmland plot records for non-legal, planning and advisory, and scheme-delivery purposes only.
• Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI):
  • It is the building block that enables interoperability across stakeholders in Agri Stack.
  • UFSI is envisioned to be used by government and authorized private users, such as Banks, Agri-Techs, agriculture value-chain companies, etc.
  • UFSI will enable a center-state federation of data, authorized and consent-brokered access to the core registries' data, and standards-based interactions between various public and private stakeholders.
• Crop sown Registry:
  • It is designed to be a federated registry of crops being sown and grown across the country every season, on every farm, by each farmer.
  • It aims to streamline and improve previously prevalent paper-based methods of surveying crops by introducing smartphone- and image-based (including drone and satellite images in the future), more fool-proof methods of crop survey.
• Agri Stack Sandbox:
  • It is a subset of the Agri Stack that will provide a simulated environment with access to the UFSI along with sample data for the various registries and databases to authorized stakeholders.
  • Purpose: To allow them to test and safely fail, or succeed and get fully authorized access to the production environments.
• Consent Manager:
  • The Consent Manager facilitates data-blind sharing of personal data only with persons/entities for whom the data principal (i.e., a farmer) has provided consent.
  • Consent once given may also be revoked, preventing future sharing of data.