WEF tells success story of Telangana’s digital transformation of agriculture

HYDERABAD: The World Economic Forum (WEF) has said that Telangana can demonstrate valuable lessons in integrating agritech as a critical lever to transform the agriculture sector to deliver agritech services to 1,00,000 farmers by 2025.

In the article ‘How to make digital transformation of agriculture work. Lessons from Telangana,’ by the WEF on Thursday, said that agriculture, the state’s priority sector, contributed 18.3 percent of the state’s gross value during 2021-22.

“It is also a sector for the state government’s efforts to drive rural development and the local economy by increasing farmers’ incomes while making agriculture more efficient and sustainable – scaling and mainstreaming agritech is a key part of its strategy,” the report noted.

WEF and Telangana to scale digital agriculture

Telangana became the first state in India to adopt a Public Private Partnership (PPP) framework in partnership with the WEF to scale digital agriculture in the state. Two initiatives were taken focusing on Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture Innovation (AI4AI) and the food innovation hubs that transform the agriculture sector by leveraging agritech and innovations.

PPP framework

The WEF-Telangana PPP framework has four pillars, agri value chain transformation, agritech sandbox, agriculture data exchange, and agriculture data management framework.

Project ‘Saagu Baagu’

Project ‘Saagu Baagu’ was initiated in 2022 and is being implemented by Digital Green with support from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is an example of agri value chain transformation focusing on easing agritech services delivery to the end customer through administrative and policy support and digital public infrastructure.

Now, more than 7,000 chili farmers in the state have accessed four agritech services, including AI-based advisories, soil testing, product quality testing, and e-commerce – all are in the project’s pilot phase.

The quality testing report of chili

The Telangana government plans to scale up existing and additional agritech services in phase II (from 2023 onwards) to 20,000 chili and groundnut farmers in three districts. The digital public infrastructure will also be introduced in Phase II. The target is to reach 1,00,000 farmers in the state in Phase III by 2025.

Agritech sandbox

Agritech services include access to financial services, e-commerce, and advisories. Of these, advisories are of the most high-risk type, as the wrong advice adversely impacts a farmer’s income. To date, most of the pieces of advice were on weather forecasts or pest infestation.

Agriculture Data Exchange (ADEx)

The Government of Telangana, with the Forum (Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution India) and the Indian Institute of Sciences, is developing an open-source technology platform to create an ecosystem of data providers and consumers. In the initial phase, ADEx will work on use cases, namely, soil health advisory, pest prediction, daily market prices, and credit assessment.

Agriculture data management framework

The agriculture data management framework is a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive data management framework for the agriculture sector to ensure the responsible development of the data-sharing ecosystem.

Emulate Telangana

WEF has said that Telangana’s experience highlights the need for governments to play an enabling role and consider non-financial yet high-impact areas to help scale agri-tech services. The Telangana example shows that PPP is viable for other states and countries facing similar ecosystem challenges.

The WEF report also said that the agritech delivering data-driven services in India is estimated to potentially add $50-70 billion to the agriculture sector by 2025. Agriculture’s digital transformation still has much work before it reaches its potential but the south Indian state of Telangana can demonstrate crucial lessons.