India is struggling to scale digital and geospatial technologies across its agriculture sector despite successful pilot projects, a senior government official said on Wednesday, pointing to the country’s diverse climate conditions and fragmented landholdings as major challenges.
“While pilot projects in horticulture and other sectors have shown success, scaling these initiatives across India's diverse climate, soil, and landholding patterns continues to be a challenge,” senior Puducherry government official Padma Jaiswal said at the GeoSmart India 2025 conference in New Delhi.
She stressed the need for bottom-up implementation, youth participation, and trust-building to ensure that technology reaches farmers effectively, according to an official statement.
India has launched several nationwide digital agriculture programmes, including soil resource mapping and the Soil Health Card scheme, which aim to offer farmers data-driven insights on nutrient management and land productivity.
Milind Wadodkar, chief soil survey officer at the Soil and Land Use Survey of India, said these efforts were laying the foundation for a comprehensive decision support system for agriculture. He also highlighted upcoming initiatives such as KrishiBIS, PMKSY WDC 3.0, and Agri Stack.
These projects integrate geospatial tools to enable more precise, site-specific interventions across farms.
A conference panel discussed satellite-based tools for crop monitoring and precision farming, with representatives from state space agencies, farmer cooperatives, and agri-tech companies examining ways to strengthen the agriculture value chain.
Panellists said India has made progress in creating a digital agriculture ecosystem. Still, they warned that the next phase requires scaling technologies across multiple crops, improving supply chain infrastructure, and ensuring that innovations reach smallholder farmers who make up much of the country’s agricultural workforce.