Discuss the role of India's Digital Public Infrastructure model in shaping multilateral agricultural cooperation.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — interoperable, open, population-scale digital systems like Aadhaar, UPI and AgriStack — has become India's signature export in global governance. Its agri-DPI model now anchors BRICS farm cooperation, institutionalised through the Indore Declaration (June 2026) [1].

India's agri-DPI as an exportable template

• AgriStack builds a farmer registry, geo-referenced land records and a unified stack channelling credit, advisory and subsidies.
• The Digital Agriculture Mission mainstreams AI, geospatial technology and data-driven farming, creating a replicable, low-cost model attractive to the Global South.

Shaping BRICS multilateral cooperation

• The 16th BRICS Agriculture Ministers' Meeting adopted innovation and technology in food systems as a priority pillar of the Indore Declaration [1].
• The new BRICS Network on Digital Agriculture — covering AI, geospatial tech and DPI, coordinated by IIT Delhi — effectively multilateralises India's stack across the expanded bloc [1].
• It leverages the BRICS Agricultural Research Platform (operationalised 2021, secretariat at ICAR-NASC, New Delhi), reframed as a "Knowledge-to-Action" hub to convert R&D into field practice [2].

Strategic significance and challenges

• Positions India as a Global South food-security diplomacy leader, projecting DPI as a shared digital public good.
• Concerns persist over data privacy and sovereignty, the digital divide among smallholders, and cross-country interoperability.

By moving BRICS from paper declarations to deliverable digital public goods, India's DPI reframes South-South agriculture around inclusion. Scaled with robust data-protection safeguards, it can advance SDG-2 on food security and remunerative farming.