Govt to bring out data policy for agriculture sector
Darpan News Desk IANS, 20 Jul, 2021 11:04 AM
New Delhi, July 20 (IANS) The government is in the process of bringing out a data policy for the agriculture sector, the Parliament was informed on Tuesday.
The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare has commenced work for creating 'Agristack', and for this, it is in the process of finalising the "India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)" which will lay down the framework, Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister Narendra Singh Tomar told Lok Sabha members K. Kanimozhi and Brijendra Singh in a written reply.
The government had constituted a task force and in furtherance, a concept paper on IDEA has been prepared and comments were invited from subject experts, farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and general public.
Tomar also said: "The government has not entered into any agreement with private companies for establishing Agristack. However, based on data which is already available in the public domain pertaining to several schemes of GoI and linking them with land records data, a federated farmers' database is being prepared."
Once completed, this would serve as the core of Agristack, he said.
"Some data from this is shared on selective basis with leading technology/agri-tech/start-upp companies to develop Proof of Concepts (PoCs). The collaboration is on pro-bono basis for a period of one year. The PoCs will help us understand the solutions that can be built using available data and some of them, if found beneficial to the farmers, will be scaled up at national level.
"As of now, the federated farmers' database is being built by taking the publicly available data as existing in various data silos in Government and no private data of the farmers is shared with any private organisation," Tomar said.
Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Badal on Thursday demanded a high court monitored probe into the manner in which the Congress government in Punjab was playing with the people's lives by creating an artificial shortage of vaccines by selling vaccine doses at a hefty profit to private hospitals.
The electronic conversation took place as US President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that India will receive Covid vaccines directly from the US stockpile, the White House said.
The Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General M.M. Naravane, reached Kashmir on Wednesday on a two-day visit to review the prevailing security situation in the Union Territory (UT), the army said in a statement.
"There have been several unfounded media reports that have peddled misinformation among the masses regarding this exercise of national importance," a ministry statement said, adding that the total number of Covid vaccine doses administered in the country so far stand at 21,85,46,667.
The Congress said that it was "appropriate for our initial statement to note that the intrusion by Israeli forces into the Holy Al Aqsa mosque during Ramzan prayers had ruptured the delicate peace in the region".
The Delhi High Court on Tuesday suggested the young patients should be prioritised in the distribution of Liposomal Amphotericin B drug, used for treating black fungus, "as they hold promise of future over the older ones who have lived their lives".
