Will Digital Technology Transform Indian Agriculture?

As a source of livelihood agriculture remains the largest sector of Indian economy. It provides employment to 58.2% of the population. The social transformation of the country and the economic growth depends on the performance of the agriculture sector. In the recent past, the per capita agricultural output has seen a steady rise, but the sector's contribution to the GDP has been decreasing. Deceleration in the agricultural growth is the major challenge faced by the so called agrarian Indian economy. The reasons for the deceleration are many like lack of public investment in research and development and irrigation, inefficiency in providing inputs, rural credit and extension services, land fragmentation, out-dated tenancy law, lack of modern market and rural infrastructure, inappropriate input pricing policies etc. To overcome all these problems, digitization in agriculture has been introduced. The convergence of agriculture and information and communication technology (ICT) is a new growth engine which helps in increasing the efficiency in every process of production, distribution and consumption. This paper focuses on understanding the concept of digital agriculture and how it propels the development of Indian agriculture. There are multiple software companies which have and are tying up with the Government of India in terms of how to build and enable the agriculture sector in this Digital Transformation. This paper also talks about the approach taken by such companies and how the supply-chain demand would be met in the future.