Agri-AI Can Unlock ₹70,000 Crore Annual Value for Farmers, says the Minister
Centre to Build National Agri-AI Research Network, Data Commons Framework: Dr. Jitendra Singh
New Delhi (thestates.news) | India’s next agricultural revolution will be driven by artificial intelligence, Union Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, Dr. Jitendra Singh said today, positioning AI as the central pillar of farm policy, research and investment architecture at the AI4Agri 2026 Summit in Mumbai.
Addressing the inaugural session of the “Global Conference on AI in Agriculture and Investor Summit 2026” here, the Minister said AI offers, for the first time, scalable solutions to structural challenges that have long constrained farm productivity – erratic weather, information asymmetry and fragmented markets. “ What AI offers is not a new diagnosis. It offers, finally, a prescription that can scale,” he said, noting that even a 10% productivity gain for the 600 million farmers across the Global South would amount to what he described as the single largest poverty-reduction opportunity of the century .
Framing agriculture as a strategic sector rather than a legacy one, Dr. Jitendra Singh linked the AI push to the ₹10,372-crore India AI Mission, which is building sovereign compute capacity, datasets and startup infrastructure at scale . He highlighted BharatGen, India’s government-owned large language model ecosystem, which has already released “Agri Param”, a domain-specific agriculture model operating in 22 Indian languages, enabling farmers to access advisory support in their own language. “This is AI that speaks to a farmer in Marathi, Bhojpuri or Kannada,” he said, underscoring the importance of linguistic inclusion.(s-pib)
