According to Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology Dr. Jitendra Singh, artificial intelligence will be the driving force behind India’s next agricultural revolution, establishing it as the cornerstone of agriculture policy, research, and investment architecture. Speaking at the opening session of the “Global Conference on AI in Agriculture and Investor Summit 2026,” he claimed that AI provides scalable answers for the first time to the structural issues of unpredictable weather, information asymmetry, and fragmented markets that have long limited farm productivity.
Dr. Singh emphasized the scope of the opportunity, stating that if AI-enabled advisories help each farmer save even Rs 5,000 annually through improved input timing, pest prediction, and market linkage, India’s 140 million farm holdings—the majority of which are small and marginal—could collectively generate an estimated Rs 70,000 crore in annual value. Citing Maharashtra’s Rs 500-crore MahaAgri-AI Policy 2025–2029 as an example, he said the Center would support and expand similar state-level initiatives. He pointed out that “Bharat-VISTAAR,” a multilingual AI tool that integrates AgriStack portals and ICAR’s agricultural practices package with AI systems, was suggested in the Union Budget 2026–2027 in order to lower farm risk and offer tailored advising support.
According to him, the emphasis is on tiny, specially designed AI models that have been trained on Indian soil types, temperature zones, and crop kinds. These models can be used with mobile phones and agricultural equipment to be deployed even in rural areas with poor connectivity. “AI does not provide a novel diagnostic,” he noted, that even a 10% increase in productivity for the 600 million farmers in the Global South would amount to what he called the single biggest chance of the century to reduce poverty. It offers, finally, a prescription that can scale.
