What is National Farmers Database?

Q. Why is this in news?
A. The Centre’s new National Farmers Database will only include land-owning farmers for now as it will be linked to digitized land records.

Q. What is National Farmers Database?

A. 

• The Central government had proposed an Agristack initiative to create a digital database that focuses on farmers and the agricultural sector.
• As part of the first step of this initiative, the government has initiated a farmers database that would serve as the core of the Agristack.
• The database would be linked to the digital land record management system and would thus only include farmers who were legal owners of agricultural land.
• The database would facilitate online single sign-on facilities for universal access and usher in proactive and personalized services to farmers such as DBT, soil and plant health advisories, weather advisories
• It would also facilitate seamless credit & insurance, seeds, fertilizers, and pesticide-related information.

Q. What is the Need for such database?

A. 

• India has 140 million operational farmland holdings.
• The availability of a database would serve an important role in the formulation of evidence-based policies for the agricultural sector.
• Also, the government can make use of the database for targeted service delivery with higher efficiency and in a focused and time-bound manner.
• The database could be used to select beneficiaries of government schemes.
• The availability of data will make it possible to implement digital technologies like AI/Machine Learning, IoT in the agricultural domain, thus opening up the sector to immense opportunities for improvement in productivity.

Q. What is AgriStack Initiative?

A. 

• The AgriStack is a collection of technologies and digital databases proposed by the Central Government focusing on India’s farmers and the agricultural sector.
• The central government has claimed that these new databases are being built to primarily tackle issues such as poor access to credit and wastage in the agricultural supply chain.
• Under AgriStack’, the government aims to provide ‘required data sets’ of farmers’ personal information to Microsoft to develop a farmer interface for ‘smart and well-organized agriculture’.
• The digital repository will aid precise targeting of subsidies, services, and policies.
• Under the program, each farmer of the country will get what is being called an FID, or a farmers’ ID, linked to land records to uniquely identify them.