Agriculture is an important sector for the socio-economic growth of the north-eastern area, because it gives the utmost contribution to the area’s web home product, employment, and livelihood. Despite the heavy dependence on it, agriculture within the area suffers from a number of issues, together with small and scattered land holdings, monocropping, low mechanisation and productiveness, post-harvest losses, poor market linkages, subsistence farming, and many others.

Besides meals safety, sustainability is a significant problem dealing with agriculture within the northeast area. Conservation of pure sources and adopting sustainable agricultural strategies are important wants. Reducing environmental affect whereas growing productiveness is a significant problem.

ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

The solutions to most of the challenges and making certain sustainability in agriculture, extra so within the N.E. area, lie within the steady technological innovation and sensible deployment of the identical, that are being pushed by automation and precision farming. Digital applied sciences equivalent to robotics, drones, synthetic intelligence (AI), the web of issues (IoT), huge information, blockchain, distant sensing, GIS, and many others. are remodeling agricultural worth chains world-wide. The new applied sciences minimize prices, enhance effectivity, assist scale back wastage of crops and meals, create extra alternatives within the worth chain, and are environmentally sustainable.

SOME IMPORTANT APPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY IN AGRI-HORTI VALUE CHAINS ARE:

Artificial Intelligence: AI can generate real-time actionable insights to assist enhance crop yield, optimise water utilization and vitality consumption, management pests, help in soil screening, present actionable information for farmers, and scale back their workload. Blockchain: It allows tamperproof and exact information about farms, inventories, fast and safe transactions, and meals monitoring.

Drone Technology: Enables surveying of huge areas and information assortment to generate higher insights; frequent and cost-effective distant monitoring of crops and livestock; evaluation of subject circumstances; and dedication of acceptable interventions equivalent to fertilisers, vitamins, and pesticides.

Geographical Information System and Remote Sensing: Helps in analysing the potential of irrigation tasks and their affect on land degradation, erosion, and drainage; detection of pests and ailments; monitoring soil situation, and many others. Internet of Things: This is used to observe and predict gentle, humidity, soil moisture, temperature, crop well being, and many others., rainfall, temperature, and different

TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IN INDIA AND THE N.E. REGION

The start-up growth lately in India has seen the institution of many agri-tech enterprises. According to NASSCOM, there have been round 450 agritech startups in India in 2022, with the quantity rising at 25 per cent year-on-year. It is reported that agritech startups in India provide a $24 billion alternative. Progressive farmer entrepreneurs are utilizing these applied sciences for recognizing and controlling crop illness, optimum utility of water, fertilisers, and different inputs, forecasting yield, and so forth.

SOME IMPORTANT DIGITAL INITIATIVES OF THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ARE: Unified Farmer Services Interface: In June 2021, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare signed an MoU with Microsoft to create an IoTbased ‘Unified Farmer Services Interface’. This is part of ‘AgriStack’—a unified platform to supply end-to-end companies throughout the agriculture meals worth chain to farmers—by creating distinctive IDs for farmers throughout the nation. Digital Agriculture Mission 2021 2025: In September 2021, the Union Agriculture Ministry introduced the Digital Agriculture Mission 2021–2025 by signing MOUs with CISCO, Ninjacart, Jio Platforms Limited, ITC Limited, and NCDEX e-Markets Limited (NeML) to help agriculture based mostly on new applied sciences, equivalent to AI, block chain, distant sensing, GIS, drones, and robots.

National Agriculture Market (eNAM): This is a pan-India digital buying and selling portal that hyperlinks the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) mandis. Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Central Agri Portal: The DBT Agri Portal is a unified central portal for agricultural schemes throughout the nation, serving to farmers undertake trendy farm equipment by way of authorities subsidies. The expertise adoption in agriculture within the north-east could be very low, and only a few agri-tech startups have come up within the area.

However, some notable new-age technology-based start-ups from the northeast area have developed the next wonderful options: A multi-lingual, synthetic intelligence-based utility for managing farm actions on a smartphone or laptop; an answer for contract farming and farm mechanisation; a wise logistics answer for purchasing agriinputs in addition to promoting the product on to the markets; a digital platform to facilitate easy accessibility to reasonably priced monetary companies equivalent to farm loans, crop insurance coverage, livestock insurance coverage, and many others.; expertise for plant tissue tradition and microbial merchandise.

The profitable adoption of newage agriculture applied sciences within the northeastern states will rely on their price, ease of operation and upkeep, and authorities initiatives. A holistic multi-stakeholder method and ecosystem, mechanisms equivalent to public-private partnerships (PPP), and authorities help are the important success elements.

The author is a senior coverage advisor within the Government of Assam