In News:

• The Government of Uttar Pradesh has issued a stern directive to all District Magistrates (DMs), warning of strict action against officials who fail to complete farmer registration under the Agri-Stack scheme within the revised deadline.
• Beginning October 16, 2025, DMs have been allotted one month to ensure 100% registration of farmers, a crucial step in the implementation of this national digital agriculture initiative.

About the Agri-Stack Scheme

• The Agri-Stack is a national digital infrastructure being developed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, in collaboration with state governments, to digitally transform Indian agriculture.
• It aims to create a unified database of farmers and farmlands, integrating information on land records, crop patterns, and scheme benefits.
• The system is envisioned to serve as a foundational digital layer for data-driven governance, policy formulation, and targeted service delivery to farmers.

Objectives and Key Features

• Empowerment through Data: Enables the creation of a unique digital identity for every farmer through a Farmer ID linked to Aadhaar, ensuring accurate targeting of benefits.
• Efficiency and Transparency: Digitally connects demographic data, landholdings, and scheme eligibility, minimizing leakages and duplication.
• Customized Services: Facilitates localized advisories, early warning systems for disasters and pest attacks, and timely delivery of inputs and credit.
• Ease of Governance: Provides a single, verified data source for policy planning, monitoring, and feedback management.
• Public–Private Collaboration: Enables authorized access for banks, agri-tech startups, and value-chain companies to offer tailored financial and technical services.

Core Components of the Agri-Stack

• Farmer and Farmland Registries:
  • A federated digital registry of all farmers across India, compiled by states and harmonized at the central level.
  • Each farmer receives a unique, verifiable Farmer ID, dynamically linked to farmland plot data for non-legal, advisory, and planning purposes.
• Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI):
  • A technical framework that ensures data interoperability between government and authorized private stakeholders.
  • Enables federated data exchange with consent-based access, improving coordination across sectors like finance, insurance, and agri-input supply.
• Crop Sown Registry:
  • Digitally records seasonal crop data for every farm using smartphone, drone, and satellite imagery.
  • Replaces traditional manual crop surveys with real-time, geo-referenced data for better yield estimation and policy response.
• Agri-Stack Sandbox:A testing environment that allows authorized users (such as agri-tech firms and banks) to safely experiment with sample datasets and digital tools before gaining production-level access.
• Consent Manager:
  • Empowers farmers to control the sharing of their personal data.
  • Data access is granted only with explicit consent, which can be revoked at any time, ensuring privacy and accountability.