India’s next agricultural revolution will be AI-driven, says Singh

Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Jitendra Singh on Sunday declared that India’s next agricultural revolution will be powered by artificial intelligence, positioning AI at the heart of farm policy, research and investment architecture.Addressing the inaugural session of the AI4Agri 2026 Summit in Mumbai — formally titled the ‘Global Conference on AI in Agriculture and Investor Summit 2026’ — Singh said AI offers scalable solutions to structural bottlenecks that have long constrained farm productivity, including erratic weather, information asymmetry and fragmented markets.“What AI offers is not a new diagnosis. It offers, finally, a prescription that can scale,” the Minister said. He argued that even a 10% 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 growth sector rather than a legacy industry, Singh linked the AI push to the ₹10,372-crore India AI Mission, which aims to build sovereign compute capacity, curated datasets and startup infrastructure at scale.He highlighted BharatGen — India’s government-owned large language model ecosystem — which has already rolled out ‘Agri Param’, a domain-specific agriculture model operating in 22 Indian languages. The platform enables farmers to access advisory support in their mother tongue.
“This is AI that speaks to a farmer in Marathi, Bhojpuri or Kannada,” Singh said, underscoring linguistic inclusion as critical to adoption.The Department of Science and Technology (DST), he added, is backing an open and interoperable India AI Open Stack to ensure that agri-AI solutions developed across states can integrate into a unified national framework. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is supporting deep-tech and AI research in collaboration with the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institute of Science, and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, with a focus on agriculture applications.
Singh pointed to ongoing deployments of drone and satellite mapping technologies that are strengthening Soil Health Cards and the Swamitva Mission by generating verified land and soil data. He also highlighted investments in climate intelligence, where earth sciences and AI are being integrated into early warning systems to help farmers “plan, not panic”.Biotechnology, he said, will complement AI in developing resilient and disease-resistant crop varieties, including early asymptomatic detection of pests and plant diseases, and advancing a circular crop economy.
Emphasising scale, Singh said India’s 140 million farm holdings — predominantly small and marginal — could collectively generate an estimated ₹70,000 crore in annual value if AI-enabled advisories help each farmer save even ₹5,000 annually through better input timing, pest prediction and improved market linkage.He cited Maharashtra’s ₹500-crore MahaAgri-AI Policy 2025–29 as a model for states, adding that the Centre would align and amplify such initiatives to create a harmonised national ecosystem.
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, Singh said, will be on small, purpose-built AI models trained on Indian soil types, climate zones and crop varieties, designed to function even in low-connectivity rural environments through mobile phones and farm equipment.
Calling for a federated national architecture, the Minister said agri digital public infrastructures such as MahaAgriX should evolve into a national agri data commons. He invited stakeholders to contribute to a proposed National Agri-AI Research Network — a collaboration between DST, state governments, ICRISAT, ICAR and global institutions — aimed at building India-specific foundational datasets for crops, soil and climate.Positioning AI as both an economic lever and a social equaliser, Singh said the coming decade would determine whether India merely digitises agriculture or fundamentally transforms it through intelligence-led productivity gains.