The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare has recently signed 4 more Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreements regarding the Agristack with Cisco, Ninjakart, ITC Limited, and Jio. In this post, we analyse these MoUs, and explain the issues that arise as a result.
Responses to our RTIs indicate that submissions from some organisations on the Agristack consultation paper were not received. Together with the AIKS, we wrote to the Agristack Working Group and the DACFW, re-submitting our suggestions and asking why they were not received in the first place.
IFF has submitted its comments on the IDEA consultation paper. We suggest that all implementation be halted till farmers have been consulted. We have also addressed issues of data localisation, federalism, data protection, user rights, the need for public investment, and inadequate data standards.
In the second post in our #PrivacyOfThePeople series, we discuss the issue of farmer rights under the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 with respect to aggressive digitization by governmental initiatives. Who really benefits from Agristack systems and how does a loss of privacy affect farmers?
The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare has recently signed 4 more MoUs regarding the Agristack with Patanjali Organic Research Institute, ESRI India Technologies, Amazon Web Services, and Star Agribazaar. Here, we analyse these MoUs, and explain what they mean for Indian agriculture.