Digital Public Infrastructure can transform agricultural governance only if land records are accurate and farmer data is protected. Discuss with reference to the Digital Agriculture Mission.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) means shared digital systems that many services can plug into, like Aadhaar and UPI. The Digital Agriculture Mission (DAM) was approved in 2024 with an outlay of ₹2,817 crore. It extends DPI to farming through AgriStack and Krishi-DSS [1]. But if the data underneath is wrong or unsafe, these systems can exclude farmers instead of empowering them.

DPI's transformative potential

• Farmer ID ("Kisan ki Pehchaan"): one verified identity for credit, crop insurance and disaster relief, which ends repeated verification [2].
• Three registries (Farmers', geo-referenced village maps, Crop Sown) are built by States/UTs, which is cooperative federalism in a State subject [1].
• Krishi-DSS uses this data for crop estimates, advisories and disaster response [2].
• Scale: over 10.31 crore IDs by August 2026 [3].

Condition 1: Accurate land records

• IDs are matched to digitised land records, so wrong owners, pending mutations or undivided family plots carry into every scheme.
• Tenants and sharecroppers usually lack records. PIB says the registry can onboard them [4], yet no count by type of farmer has been published.
• Conditionality risk: the ID is compulsory for new PM-KISAN registrations in 19 States [5]. A missing ID can mean a lost benefit.

Condition 2: Protected farmer data

• Farmer and digital-rights groups objected that AgriStack began without a data-protection law or public consultation.
• The Ministry now cites the DPDP Act, 2023 and its 2025 Rules. It points to consent-based sharing with authorised bodies, data owned by each State and CERT-In security norms [3].
• Gaps: consent sought at camps to keep benefits is hardly free. The Act's "legitimate uses" clause lets the State process data without fresh consent. Access for private agri-tech firms has no published rules.

Way forward

• Speed up land-record updating under DILRMP. States should adopt NITI Aayog's Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016 to give tenants a legal record.
• Publish ID data by tenure and gender. Keep a non-ID fallback with grievance redress, as PM-KISAN does in States without a registry [5].
• Publicly list authorised data users and their purposes.

DAM has built DPI quickly. Accurate land records and enforceable data rights will decide whether it reaches every farmer. Pairing digitisation with tenancy reform and privacy safeguards can make AgriStack truly inclusive, in line with Article 21 (Puttaswamy) and SDG 2.