Context: Recently, Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister launched the Seed Traceability, Authentication, and Holistic Inventory (SATHI) Portal and also praised Abhilekh patal.

About SATHI Portal

• SATHI Portal is a Centralized Online System for seed traceability, authentication, and inventory.

• Aim: To deal with the challenges of seed production, quality seed identification, and seed certification.

• Developed by: the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in collaboration with the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

• There will be a QR code through which the seeds can be traced.

• The portal will ensure a quality assurance system, and identify the source of seed in the seed production chain.

• The system will consist of integrated 7 verticals of the seed chain - Research Organisation, Seed Certification, Seed Licensing, Seed Catalogue, Dealer to Farmer Sales, Farmer Registration and Seed DBT.

• Seeds with valid certification can only be sold by valid licensed dealers to centrally registered farmers who will receive a subsidy through DBT directly into their pre-validated bank accounts.

About the Abhilekh patal portal

• Abhilekh is a Sanskrit term used in India for records since ancient times and Patal is a Sanskrit word meaning a board, platform, or a surface.

• A combination of both these words has been adopted as an acronym for Portal for Access to Archives and Learning.

• It is a full-featured web portal to access the National Archives of India’s reference media and its digitized collections through the Internet.

• It is a ‘work-in-progress’ and both the reference media and the digital data will be regularly augmented.

• It contains the reference media of more than 2.7 million files held by the National Archives of India.

The National Archives of India

• It is the repository of the non-current records of the Government of India and is holding them in trust for the use of record creators and general users. 

• It is an Attached Office of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

• Set up on 11 March 1891 in Calcutta (Kolkata) as the Imperial Record Department, it was transferred to The New Capital to New Delhi in 1911.