Primus Partners proposes six policy steps to scale AI in Indian agriculture
A new Primus Partners report says India needs six policy interventions to speed up AI adoption in agriculture, improve trust in digital tools and make agri-tech more inclusive for women farmers.
Primus Partners has released a policy report arguing that India needs targeted institutional and regulatory changes if artificial intelligence is to scale effectively across agriculture. The report, titled “6 Policy interventions needed for the cognitive revolution in agriculture”, looks at how AI can improve decision-making in crop planning, advisory services, procurement systems, quality assessment, logistics and market access.
The authors say India already has important public digital building blocks in place through initiatives such as the IndiaAI Mission, the Digital Agriculture Mission and AgriStack. Even so, they argue that a data-rich environment has not yet translated into practical farm-level intelligence. The report describes this gap as a developing “crisis of intelligence”, where large volumes of agricultural data still fail to become usable insights for growers and other actors in the value chain.
According to the report, several structural barriers continue to slow adoption. These include fragmented datasets, limited digital inclusion, under-representation of women farmers in digital systems and the lack of trusted validation mechanisms for AI-based agricultural advisories. Primus Partners argues that the success of AI in farming will depend not only on technology, but also on data quality, local relevance and trust in the recommendations delivered to producers.
To address those weaknesses, the report proposes six policy interventions. They include an indigenous digital agricultural knowledge registry, an agri-AI rating system for advisory tools, a framework to assess women’s inclusion in agricultural AI systems, stronger representation of women in AI governance, women-friendly agritech procurement standards and AI-enabled quality-linked minimum support price mechanisms. In other words, the report calls for AI deployment to be tied to accountability, inclusion and practical utility rather than treated as a purely technical upgrade.
The gender dimension is central to the proposal. Primus Partners notes that women account for roughly 40-45 per cent of India’s agricultural workforce, yet still face barriers in accessing digital services and AI-enabled platforms. The report warns that future agricultural technologies will replicate existing inequalities unless they are designed with inclusion at the core. It points to examples such as Maharashtra’s MahaAgri-AI Policy, Telangana’s Saagu Baagu initiative, AI-enabled agriculture platforms in Andhra Pradesh, and international references from the Netherlands, Japan, Kenya and Ethiopia. Its overall conclusion is that the next phase of transformation must combine farmer knowledge, contextual data and responsible AI deployment.