A roundtable workshop on ‘The Digital Ecosystem Opportunity for Indian Agriculture: Making the Right Choices’ was organised by IT For Change, SEWA Cooperative Federation and Vrutti on 24 August in New Delhi, India. The workshop was held at the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi.
The roundtable was attended by a selected group of technology experts, cooperators, senior academics, key bureaucrats and policymakers from across the country.
Mr. Ganesh Gopal, Lead-Entrepreneurship Development, ICA-AP spoke at the event reflecting upon recent engagements with platform collectives, appropriate sectoral user cases and emergence of platform cooperativism worldwide. He highlighted the collectively-owned platform interventions proposed and undertaken by Government of Kerala, the ‘Kerala Food Platform’ (KFP) based on the UAE Food Platform. This is being implemented through an initiative led by the Kerala Development and Strategic Innovation Council (K-DISC), operating under the aegis of the Department of Planning and Economic Affairs (Innovation and Development), Government of Kerala.
Mr. Gopal, discussed the need and relevance of technology-based projects such as the KFP which significantly empower the community, build sustainable value chains, address the problem of safe-food and traceability at every stage of production and value chain, from producer to the end-customer. The KFP is currently being implemented with the support of Palliyakal Service Cooperative Bank at Ezhikkara Panchayat, Ernakulam District, Kerala and the Government is exploring the feasibility of expanding the pilot initially across the Ernakulam district and later across the State of Kerala. Mr. Gopal was also joined by the developer and technology-expert who built the platform, Mr. Arun Krishnan for a quick demo of the application, facets of traceability and back-end database management.
Other experts from across the country who participated in the roundtable were Mr. Thampy Koshy, Managing Director, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade of Government of India; Mr. Rajeev Chawla, Strategic Advisor and Chief Knowledge Officer, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India; Mr. Prashant Mehra, Platform Commons Foundation; Ms. Mirai Chatterjee, Chairperson, SEWA Cooperative Federation and Ms. Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change. They discussed specific dimensions of ‘Digital Ecosystem Opportunity for Indian Agriculture’ including (Round 1) Farmer-centric digitalization of agricultural value chains: A policy overview , (Round 2) Leveraging the digital opportunity for social enterprises and cooperatives working on farmer empowerment: Ear to the ground, and (Round 3) Data stacks for the digital transformation in agriculture – Insights from Kerala and the EU.
Several pertinent issues such as farmer data aggregation, data privacy, data-ownership, efficiency and reliability of existing data stacks, existence of policy safeguards and complying with legal norms were discussed at the roundtable.
