News Excerpt: 

The Agriculture Minister inaugurated a Krishi Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) set up at Krishi Bhavan in New Delhi, a big-screen dashboard of all digital innovations in the sector.

What is the Krishi ICCC?

• The ICCC is a tech-based solution involving multiple IT applications and platforms, which is designed to help in making informed decisions. 
• The center is housed in the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare, which is responsible for legislation, policy formation, and implementation of initiatives in the agriculture sector.
• The ICCC uses state-of-the-art technologies such as artificial intelligence, remote sensing, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect and process large amounts of granular data.
• The ICCC uses platforms including the Krishi Decision Support System (DSS) to collect micro-level data, process it, and present the macro picture.

What do you get as the visual output?

• On eight large, 55-inch LED screens installed at the ICCC, One can see information on:
• crop yields, production, drought situation, and cropping patterns (geographic region-wise and year-wise) in map, timeline, and drill-down views.
• One can  also see:
• The relevant trends (periodic and non-periodic), outliers, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and receive insights, alerts, and feedback on agriculture schemes, programmes, projects, and initiatives.
• The ICCC has a contact center and a helpdesk facility, with the operator’s handset capable of being converted into a call center. 
• If needed, farmer beneficiaries can interact directly with officials 
• Or the Minister through video conferencing facilities.

What is the objective of the ICCC?

• The ICCC will enable comprehensive monitoring of the farm sector by making available at one place geospatial information received from multiple sources, including:
• Remote sensing
• Plot-level data received through soil surveys
• Weather data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD)
• Sowing data from Digital Crop Survey
• Farmer- and farm-related data from Krishi MApper
• An application for geo-fencing and geo-tagging of land
• Market intelligence information from the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics (UPAg); 
• Yield estimation data from the General Crop Estimation Survey (GCES).

The integrated visualization of the data will enable quick and efficient decision-making by the ICCC ecosystem and can be linked with the PM-Kisan chatbot going forward.

It can generate a customized farmer-specific advisories

• The AI-/ machine learning-based system will identify a farmer through his/ her mobile number or Aadhaar, and match it with the farmer’s field information obtained through:
• Land records
• Historical crop sowing information from the crop registry, 
• Weather data from IMD, etc. 
• It will then generate a customized advisory in the local language of the farmer.
• For this, the system will use the Bhashini platform that allows translation into several Indian languages.

Going forward: 

The ICCC can create an ecosystem based on which individual farmer-level advisories can be generated through apps like Kisan e-mitra, a chatbot developed for PM-Kisan beneficiaries.