India: Digital Technology Has Huge Potential to Transform Agricultural Economy
3 November 2017 Digital technology holds tremendous potential to transform the Indian agricultural economy and impact the lives of Indian farmers, writes Rana Kapoor on FinancialExpress.com. Major challenges confronting Indian agriculture include declining farm productivity, unsustainable usage of resources, diminishing and degrading natural resources, a rapidly growing demand for high-quality and safe food, stagnating farm incomes, and fragmented land holdings. But these can be overcome through sustainable and scalable deployment of digital technologies and infrastructure.
A case in point is the e-commerce wave in the past few years that has been fast catching up in the food supply chain aggregation space, both at the farm-end as well as the consumer-end, which has greatly benefitted farmers and consumers alike.
Numerous farm-level applications of digital technology, including remote sensing, GIS, crop and soil-health monitoring, and livestock and farm management, have been making their mark. At the pre-harvest stage, digital technology can recommend crop and input selection and assist in obtaining credit and insurance. Weather advisories and disease and pest-related assistance through data generation, as well as the advanced analytics, allow farmers to make smart decisions about farming and benefit from an economical use of inputs and labor.
Read more at FinancialExpress.com.
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