The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Government of Telangana have signed an agreement to jointly create India's first Agricultural Data Exchange (ADEx). "ADEx will be built upon India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX), a pioneer in enabling the use of data for public good," Bengaluru-based IISc said in a statement on Monday. IUDX was also created in IISc in partnership with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and it has launched a variety of platforms, tools, and applications that have benefitted urban citizens, it said.

The partnership with the Telangana government will bring these same concepts to the agriculture sector, enabling a variety of new services for the farmers ranging from more credit options, better insurance products, improved seed tracking, and more targeted farming advisory, the statement said. ADEx will be piloted in Telangana with a select set of partners and use-cases by early 2023, followed by a production rollout within the same state during that year.

Both public and private sector data shall be made available through ADEx and a variety of start-ups and more established companies will be encouraged to build these new farmer services, it was stated. It is expected that the ADEx will then be made available to other States and broadly deployed across the nation. Principal Secretary IT, Government of Telangana, Jayesh Ranjan was quoted as saying that data is the key to enabling new services for our farmers and improving the agriculture sector.

"With ADEx, we hope to enable a new eco-system of application developers who will now have access to a best-of-breed data platform to create applications targeted at bringing technology-driven change to the sector," he said. IISc Director Professor G Rangarajan said a nation, where the majority of people make their livelihood from agriculture, needs to apply its considerable technical firepower to this sector.

"With the ADEx initiative, IISc is pleased to be a part of that effort and we have high hopes that this will help the farmers of Telangana and eventually the nation," he said.