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Digital technologies hold great potential to transform the Indian agricultural economy and impact the lives of Indian farmers. Explain. 
(10 marks, 150 words) Answer:
Over the last few decades massive technological development and opportunities have transformed people’s lives. However, these opportunities have not benefited the agriculture sector in a significant way. 
Major    challenges          confronting        Indian   agriculture          include declining  farm productivity,unsustainable  usage    of   resources,  diminishing  and degrading  natural resources, stagnating farm incomes etc. The challenges in agriculture can be overcome through sustainable & scalable deployment of digital technologies & infrastructure. Digital Technology refers to the use of digital resources to effectively find, analyse, create, communicate, and use information in a digital context. 
Farm-level initiatives:
•        Smart farming: Weather advisories, disease and pest-related assistance through data generation as well as the advanced analytics allow farmers to make smart decisions about farming. They can benefit from an economical use of labour and inputs, thus also preventing soil and water contamination.
•        Improved pre-harvest efficacy: At the pre-harvest stage, digital technology can recommend crop and input selection and assist in obtaining credit and insurance. Monitoring technologies, including through use of drones, are being developed with the objective of creating an integrated hyperlocal farm data collection and crop analytics platform to increased pre-harvest efficacy.
•        Others: Numerous farm-level applications of digital technology, including remote sensing, GIS, crop and soil-health monitoring, and livestock and farm management, have been making their mark. 
Transforming agribusiness sector:
•        Supply Chains: The e-commerce wave in the past few years has been fast catching up in the food supply chain aggregation space (both at the farm-end as well as the consumerend), which has greatly benefitted farmers and consumers alike.
•        IoT on Dairy farms: Dairy farm optimisation and monitoring services by leveraging Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud and mobility are increasingly being used to improve milk production, milk procurement, storage & supply chain.
•        Digital Payments: The digital payments space is fast evolving the way food processing companies engage with farmers for offering a transparent and robust payment mechanism.
•        Access to markets: The electronic National Agricultural Market (e-NAM), coupled with associated ecosystem development including robust warehouse e-receipts and insurance and financing for farmers, has the potential to radically transform the price discovery & transaction efficiency of farm markets in India. 
•        Farming-as-a-service (FaaS): A range of service providers on the Farming-as-a-service (FaaS) model are leveraging digital technology to provide innovative farm-to-fork solutions to farmers and agri businesses.


The common barriers to commercialisation and scaling up of technology include Access to finance, Gaps in technology infrastructure, Limited access to institutionalised farmer networks etc. Inclusive growth in agriculture can be achieved by an effective policy framework, enabling technology ecosystem and innovative financing, which can empower Indian farmers and make agriculture sustainable.