Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare signed five memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with the private companies on September 14, 2021.

MoUs were signed for pilot projects with five private companies namely, CISCO, ITC Limited, Ninjacart, Jio Platforms Limited, and NCDEX e-Markets Limited (NeML).

• As per Agriculture Ministry, Jio Platforms Limited will conduct its pilot project in order to provide advisories for farmers in Jalna & Nasik districts of Maharashtra.
• ITC Limited has signed MoU in a bid to build a “Customized ‘Site Specific Crop Advisory’ service.”
• MoU with the ITC limited will help in implementing the proposal in identified villages of Sehore and Vidisha districts of Madhya Pradesh. It will support Wheat crop operations.
• MoU with Cisco will “conceptualize the Proof of Concept in effective knowledge sharing between farmers, administration, academia and industry” in Kaithal district of Haryana and Morena district of Madhya Pradesh.
• MoU with NCDEX e Markets Limited (NeML) will look after four services–Market Linkages, Financial Linkages, Aggregation of demand, and Data Sanitization in three districts namely, Guntur (Andhra Pradesh), Nasik (Maharashtra) and Devanagere (Karnataka).
• Ninjacart will help in the development and hosting the Agri Marketplace Platform (AMP). It will bring all the participants in post-harvest market linkage together. As per MoU, Proof of Concept (POC) will be conducted in Anand (Gujarat), Chhindwara (Madhya Pradesh) and Indore (Madhya Pradesh).

These pilot projects will help the farmers in making informed decisions on what crop to grow, what variety of seed to use, as well as what best practices to adopt in order to maximise the yield.

These MoUs were signed as a part of Agriculture Ministry’s Digital Agriculture Mission, that has been launched for a period of five years (2021 -2025) for projects based on new technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, use of drones, remote sensing and GIS technology and robots etc.