IT for Change, in partnership with SEWA Cooperative Federation and Vrutti Livelihood Impact Partners, organized a policy roundtable on 24 August 2022 in New Delhi to explore emerging intersections between digitalization and agriculture in India.
Titled, ‘The Digital Ecosystem Opportunity for Indian Agriculture - Making the Right Choices’, the roundtable was a part of our project, ‘Re-wiring India’s Digitalising Economy for Women’s Rights and Well-being’, supported by the European Commission and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
In recent years, policymakers, agriculturists, and the wider community of development practitioners have recognized the transformative role that digital technologies can play in addressing the productivity crisis in Indian agriculture. In its current configuration, approaches to digitalization are largely app-centric, where innovation is driven by a handful of Agri Big Tech companies in silos. There is an urgent need to adopt a digital ecosystem approach that accounts for a farmer-centric vision of value creation, developed in collaboration with workers, farmers, and producers.
Against this backdrop, we organized this policy roundtable to facilitate dialogue and discussion between scholar-practitioners, open-source technologists, and policymakers to explore ongoing and emerging digitalization trends in the agriculture sector, and potential technological pathways for enhancing farm livelihoods.
Read the entire event report here.