Under IDEA, the government plans to issue a unique ID number to every farmer and set up an interface that would handle multiple types of transactions in the digital agriculture space. The Indian government is attempting to create an ‘Agristack’ along the lines of the NDHB and IndEA framework. The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare has introduced this stack as the India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) and published a consultation paper for public feedback. The consultation paper can be viewed here. IDEA Architecture The paper states that IndEA 2.0 has been proposed as a set of architectural patterns meant to be adopted by small government departments to design their own ecosystem architectures. These patterns are defined in terms of Building Blocks. A ‘Building Block’ has been defined as “a reusable package of business or technological functionality” depending on the degree to which they are decentralised. These Blocks are further categorised into - Core Building Blocks: A single database at the national level designed, developed, and maintained by the government. Common Building Blocks: They are developed and hosted by the Ministry on a multi-tenant framework, and can be shared by the States and other ecosystem entities optionally. Reference Building Blocks: A reference building block has generic functionality which can be customised as needed. It is developed by the Ministry and the code is published as open source for download by the states or private sector organisations. The salient features of IDEA Architecture IDEA Core’s foundational building blocks Unique Farmer ID…
