India’s farms, once the heartbeat of its food security, now stand at the edge of a technological reckoning. A new NITI Aayog report, Reimagining Agriculture: A Roadmap for Frontier Technology-Led Transformation, sketches an ambitious plan to turn the country’s vast, uneven farm sector into a digital, data-driven and innovation-led powerhouse by 2047 — the year India hopes to call itself a developed nation.
The report stops short of naming a price tag. Yet, the scale of ambition it sets out — rewiring millions of small farms through AI, biotechnology, drones, and data systems — would easily run into several lakh crore rupees over the next two decades. It calls this shift the “Intelligent Revolution,” a moment as consequential as the Green Revolution of the 1960s that first made India self-sufficient in food.
“Incremental improvements are no longer enough,” writes NITI Aayog CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam. “A paradigm shift is essential — and it must be powered by technology.”
Nearly half of India’s workforce still depends on agriculture, but the sector contributes barely a sixth of GDP. Productivity is low, landholdings are shrinking, and incomes are under strain. More than half of Indian farmers are in debt; one bad monsoon or market crash can erase a year’s effort. Post-harvest losses alone drain over ₹1.5 lakh crore annually. The report bluntly warns that without structural change, growth will plateau long before India’s centenary year.
“If the Green Revolution fed India,” writes Debjani Ghosh, the report’s lead architect, “this Intelligent Revolution must empower it — ensuring every farmer becomes a co-creator of the future of food.”
At its core, NITI Aayog proposes a three-part framework — Enhance, Reimagine, and Converge. It isn’t another government scheme but a strategy to knit together data, innovation, and institutions into one ecosystem. The first step is digital groundwork. The report envisions “AgriKosh,” a national farm data grid integrating everything from land records and satellite imagery to crop surveys and private databases. With it, policymakers, startups and even individual farmers could access real-time information, weather updates, and AI-based advisories.
The second layer is people. The report admits that India’s digital divide runs through its fields. So, it calls for an expanded extension network — chatbots, kiosks, “Drone Didis” and trained youth who can bridge technology and trust at the grassroots. It argues that information alone won’t transform agriculture unless it’s translated into action at the last mile.
The second pillar, “Reimagine,” is about talent and research. NITI Aayog says India must overhaul how it studies and teaches agriculture — from crop-specific research to “mission-oriented” R&D that cuts across disciplines like AI, genomics, and soil science. It wants new curricula that produce agri-technologists, not just agronomists. Public spending on research — currently around 0.6% of the agriculture budget — must rise. Without it, India risks being an importer, not an inventor, of next-generation farm technology.
The third pillar, “Converge,” stresses partnership. India’s agri-innovation scene is crowded but fragmented: startups, cooperatives, research labs, and ministries often work in silos. The report recommends a network of Frontier Technology Centres of Excellence — each focused on a high-impact area such as precision farming or climate-smart crops — funded jointly by government, academia and industry. These would serve as innovation hubs, not committees, with clear three-to-five-year deliverables.
Equally critical, it says, is policy agility. NITI Aayog proposes an AgriTech Policy Foresight Unit to track emerging technologies and advise on adaptive regulation. It also suggests “regulatory sandboxes” — safe testing grounds for drones, farm robotics or gene-edited crops before full commercial rollout. In short, it wants India’s policy process to move at the speed of innovation, not after it.
The report identifies six major roadblocks that must be dismantled: poor-quality data, weak trust in technology, limited digital literacy, talent shortages, fragmented ecosystems, and scarce patient capital. Each one, it argues, is holding back transformation. Fixing them won’t happen overnight — but without tackling them together, India will keep circling around the same problems of low productivity and uneven incomes.
Although the roadmap avoids putting a figure on the total investment required, experts interpret the scale as comparable to India’s renewable energy transition — which drew more than ₹10 lakh crore in two decades. A transformation of Indian agriculture on this order, they say, would likely need similar mobilisation through public funding, blended finance and long-term private capital. The report’s message is unmistakable: frontier technologies need patient capital, stable policy, and strong collaboration — or they will remain scattered pilot projects.
The document also outlines a timeline in broad strokes. By 2030, every farm should be digitally mapped, extension services AI-enabled, and data systems fully interoperable. By 2035, India should have research clusters and skill pipelines aligned with national missions. And by 2047, the report envisions a farm economy that is predictive, resilient and globally competitive — where productivity, sustainability and income security move in step.
It’s a future that will demand more than gadgets and dashboards. It will require new kinds of cooperation — between ministries and markets, scientists and soil, startups and smallholders. The report closes on a striking line: “The next Green Revolution will not be measured in tonnes but in terabytes.”
That line, more than any number, captures the shift NITI Aayog is asking India to make — from a country that once fought hunger with grain, to one that must now fight uncertainty with intelligence.