Telangana: Draft of Agriculture Data Management Policy 2022 released

Hyderabad: The State government has released the draft of the Agriculture Data Management Policy (ADMP)-2022, which aims to ensure efficient management of agricultural data for development of agriculture sector besides protecting farmers’ rights.

Emerging Technologies in association with World Economic Forum released the draft of the comprehensive policy, and sought suggestions and opinions from various stake-holders before August 6 in a prescribed format.

The State government, with the objective of giving a thrust to the agriculture sector, is developing irrigation infrastructure and providing input subsidy to farmers. In addition to these measures, the State government intends to promote digital agriculture through extensive use of technologies like AI, Machine Learning, drones, satellite imagery to increase production and profitability of farmers.

The idea is to deploy new technologies to transform all the segments of the agricultural value chain. In this regard, data management, including aspects pertaining to agriculture operations, production and general services, is critical resource for successful deployment of new technologies.

Towards this initiative, creating a policy conducive to the systematic collection, processing, sharing and use of agricultural data to support a wide range of use cases in the farm sector was required, with prime focus on protecting farmers’ rights.

At present, there is no such policy. There a possibility of public and private organisations creating data in silos and could be reluctant in sharing the same with other entities. Considering these factors, the government felt it expedient to streamline and codify the processes, responsibilities, norms, and practices relating to the management of agricultural data for farmers and other stake-holders benefit.