Why in News?

Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare (MoA&FW) inaugurated a Krishi Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) set up at Krishi Bhavan in New Delhi.

A big-screen dashboard of all digital innovations in the sector, the ICCC marks a “significant leap forward” in leveraging technology for the advancement of agricultural practices.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• What is the Krishi ICCC?
• How will the Krishi ICCC Work?
• What Information will the Krishi ICCC Provide?
• What is the Significance of the ICCC?

What is the Krishi ICCC?

• The ICCC is a tech-based solution involving multiple IT applications and platforms, which is designed to help in making informed decisions.
• The centre is housed in the MoA&FW, which is responsible for legislation, policy formation, and implementation of initiatives in the agriculture sector.
• The ICCC uses state of the art technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), remote sensing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect and process large amounts of granular data.
• The ICCC uses platforms including the Krishi Decision Support System (DSS) to collect micro-level data, process it, and present the macro picture.

How will the Krishi ICCC Work?

• The AI-/ machine learning-based system will identify a farmer through his/ her mobile number or Aadhaar.
• Then, the system will match it with the farmer’s field information obtained through land records, historical crop sowing information from the crop registry, weather data from IMD, etc.
• It will then generate a customised advisory in the local language of the farmer. For this, the system will use the Bhashini platform that allows translation into several Indian languages.

What Information will the Krishi ICCC Provide?

• On 8 large, 55-inch LED screens installed at the ICCC, one can see information on -
  • Temperatures, rainfall, wind speed, crop yields, production, drought situation, cropping patterns (geographic region-wise and year-wise) and production estimations.
  • In graphical/ map, timeline, and drill-down format.
• One can also see -
  • The relevant trends (periodic and non-periodic), outliers, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and
  • Receive insights, alerts, and feedback on agriculture schemes, programmes, projects, and initiatives.
• If needed, farmer beneficiaries can interact directly with officials or the Minister through video conferencing facilities.

What is the Significance of the ICCC?

• The ICCC will enable comprehensive monitoring of the farm sector by making available at one place geospatial information received from multiple sources, including -
  • Remote sensing;
  • Plot-level data received through soil survey;
  • Weather data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD);
  • Sowing data from Digital Crop Survey;
  • Farmer-and farm-related data from Krishi MApper (an application for geo-fencing and geo-tagging of land);
  • Market intelligence information from the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics (UPAg); and
  • Yield estimation data from the General Crop Estimation Survey (GCES).
• The integrated visualisation of the data will enable quick and efficient decision-making.
• Going forward,
  • The ICCC ecosystem can be linked with the Kisan e-mitra, a chatbot developed for PM-Kisan beneficiaries and
  • Can create an ecosystem based on which individual farmer-level advisories can be generated.