Agri-AI to Unlock ₹70000 Cr Annual Value as India’s Next Farm Revolution Goes AI-Driven: Jitendra Singh

Mumbai: India’s next agricultural revolution will be driven by artificial intelligence, Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Dr Jitendra Singh said, positioning AI as the central pillar of farm policy, research and investment architecture at the AI4Agri 2026 Summit in Mumbai.

Addressing the inaugural session of the Global Conference on AI in Agriculture and Investor Summit 2026, he said AI offers, for the first time, scalable solutions to structural challenges that have long constrained farm productivity — erratic weather, information asymmetry and fragmented markets. “What AI offers is not a new diagnosis. It offers, finally, a prescription that can scale,” he said, adding that even a 10 percent productivity gain for the 600 million farmers across the Global South could become the single largest poverty-reduction opportunity of the century.

Framing agriculture as a strategic sector rather than a legacy one, he linked the AI push to the ₹10,372-crore IndiaAI Mission, which is building sovereign compute capacity, datasets and startup infrastructure at scale. He highlighted BharatGen, India’s government-owned large language model ecosystem, which has released “Agri Param”, a domain-specific agriculture model operating in 22 Indian languages. “This is AI that speaks to a farmer in Marathi, Bhojpuri or Kannada,” he said, underscoring linguistic inclusion.

The minister said the department of science and technology is supporting an open, interoperable India AI Open Stack to ensure agri-AI solutions developed anywhere in the country can integrate into a national framework. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is funding deep-tech and AI research in collaboration with Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institute of Science and Indian Council of Agricultural Research, including agriculture applications.

He pointed to drone and satellite mapping already strengthening Soil Health Cards and the Swamitva Mission by providing verified land and soil data. Investments in climate intelligence, he said, are integrating earth sciences and AI into early warning systems to help farmers “plan, not panic”. Biotechnology, he added, will be critical in developing resilient and disease-resistant crops, including early asymptomatic detection of pest and plant diseases, and advancing a circular crop economy.

Highlighting the scale of opportunity, he said India’s 140 million farm holdings, most small and marginal, could together generate an estimated ₹70,000 crore in annual value if AI-enabled advisories help each farmer save even ₹5,000 a year through better input timing, pest prediction and market linkage. He cited Maharashtra’s ₹500-crore MahaAgri-AI Policy 2025–29 as a model and said 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. 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.

Calling for a federated national architecture, Jitendra Singh said agri digital public infrastructures should evolve into a National Agri Data Commons. He invited stakeholders to contribute to a proposed National Agri-AI Research Network — a collaboration between the department of science and technology, state governments, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICAR and global institutions — to build India-specific foundational datasets for crops, soil and climate.

Describing agri-AI as “the largest untapped productivity market in the world,” he urged investors to back scalable platforms rather than isolated pilots. “The farmer does not need AI simply for the sake of it. He needs it to be useful. Let that be our compass,” he said, reiterating India’s intent to act not as a recipient but as a co-architect of global agri-AI frameworks.