Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s next agricultural revolution will be driven by artificial intelligence which can unlock Rs 70,000 crore for farmers , Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology Dr Jitendra Singh said.
Addressing the inaugural session of the Global Conference on AI in Agriculture and Investor Summit 2026, he said that AI offers, for the first time, scalable solutions to structural challenges that have long constrained farm productivity – erratic weather, information asymmetry, and fragmented markets.
Highlighting the scale of opportunity, Jitendra said India’s 140 million farm holdings, most of them small and marginal, could together generate an estimated Rs 70,000 crore in annual value if AI-enabled advisories help each farmer save even Rs 5,000 a year through better input timing, pest prediction and market linkage. He cited Maharashtra’s Rs 500-crore MahaAgri-AI Policy 2025–29 as a model, adding that the Centre would align and amplify such state-level initiatives.
The Union Budget 2026–27 has proposed ‘Bharat-Vistaar’ — a multilingual AI tool integrating AgriStack portals and ICAR’s agricultural practices package with AI systems — to provide customised advisory support and reduce farm risk, he noted. The focus, he said, is on small, purpose-built AI models trained on Indian soil types, climate zones and crop varieties, deployable even in low-connectivity rural areas through mobile phones and farm equipment.
“What AI offers is not a new diagnosis. It offers, finally, a prescription that can scale,” he said, noting that even a 10 per cent productivity gain for the 600 million farmers across the Global South would amount to what he described as the single largest poverty-reduction opportunity of the century.
