The drive to empower farmers began two decades ago with e-Choupal, the largest rural digital infrastructure in the world. The connected kiosks enable more than 4 million farmers to sell their produce directly, get real-time market prices, access farming best practices and buy agricultural products with ease. Now, e-Choupal 4.0 delivers the same conveniences on smartphones, improving their market readiness. The multilingual, intuitive, and easily scalable digital farming platform is built on an AI-powered AgriGater platform, with IoT capabilities and Cloud advantage.

The platform makes e-Choupal accessible through mobile app and web interfaces, in both online and offline mode. Built on microservices architecture, the platform seamlessly integrates with other services, facilitating easier connect for global humanitarian organizations, public institutions, enterprises, and the farming community. It provides CPG and FMCG companies direct access to the farmers, thus enabling direct sourcing, bringing the benefit of better pricing, and personalized interactions. Digital Farming Platform equips every farmer to effortlessly engage with the entire services, products, and information ecosystem.

Digital Farming AgriGater Framework (Azure Cloud Based Architecture)

Key Modules:

• Farmer Forums: Connecting farming community among themselves and with the service providers
• Crop Advisory: Providing agriculture best practices and support in managing farming activities
• Crop Monitoring: Comprehensive tracking of crop progress by capturing information about different crop stages and activities
• Market Place: Providing direct access to agricultural products and services

Platform Features:

• Multilingual Support to farmers in different regions, facilitating easier access to information and interaction with the service providers
• Intuitive User Interface delivers easy navigation and interaction for different user groups including farmers, agronomists, horticulturists, and crop development managers
• Geo-location Integration equips farmers to map their land by plotting on the map or simply walking along their farmland boundary
• Easy Connect to Applications with built-in support for multiple apps leveraging the grower, field, and other data, as well as linking other apps on the platform
• No-Code Configuration allows easy addition and update of data forms at grower and field level, as well as data elements creation and configuration for crop stage monitoring
• Self Service Capabilities to empower farmers to interact with the platform independently after initial handholding by agronomists
• Image Capture and Notes to simplify interaction with experts on crop growth, infections, and issue-specific advice

Farmer Enablement:

• Selection and Buying Process for products and services are now simplified for grass root level empowerment
• Farm Accounting is now easier for the rural masses, equipping them to stay competitive and manage crop economics better
• Marketing, Storage, and Financial Management equips growers to seamlessly connect with the market and services eco-system
• Crop Planning and Production is now monitored and tracked on pre-defined metrics as per crop-specific data elements

Impact Created:

• More than 50,000 farmers are registered on the e-Choupal 4.0 platform of the Agri-Business Division of ITC Ltd, powered by AgriGater
• Farmers participating in the Integrated Chilli Crop Development Program achieved improved productivity of 12.8% and 31.1% in net returns