India sets sights on 450 million tonnes of food grains by 2047
FAI Director General S.K. Chaudhari says India needs close to 450 million tonnes of food grains by 2047 and must accelerate digital agriculture and smart fertilizer management.
India needs to raise food-grain production to more than 400 million tonnes by 2030 and close to 450 million tonnes by 2047, when the country marks 100 years of independence, Fertiliser Association of India Director General S.K. Chaudhari said at the opening of FAI’s four-day national training program on information and communication technology for smart fertilizer management in Kufri, near Shimla.
Chaudhari said ICT-driven efficiency in agriculture is no longer optional and has become a national imperative. In his view, intelligent use of technology across farming and the fertilizer sector must underpin higher productivity, better resource allocation and sustained growth in output. He framed the challenge not as a simple digitization exercise, but as a broader shift toward data-led and agronomy-led decision-making.
He also called for a fundamental change in the way the fertilizer industry thinks about delivery. The target, he said, is not the farmer in the abstract but the plant root, supplied with the right nutrient, in the right quantity, at the right place and at the right time. That approach, he argued, opens the way for precision nutrition, sensor-based delivery systems and new generations of specialty fertilizer formulations.
Chaudhari added that India’s long agrarian knowledge base positions it to lead globally through natural farming, organic farming, conservation agriculture and regenerative agriculture. He also highlighted blockchain as a tool that could reshape fertilizer logistics and governance by creating traceability and transparency all the way from port of entry to the farm gate.
According to Chaudhari, ICT can improve performance across the full value chain, from production planning and plant risk management to supply-chain optimization, remote sensing, GIS-based soil mapping, satellite imagery and AI-driven advisory systems. He said the four-day training program was designed to cover that full spectrum, including blockchain for logistics, predictive analytics for supply and demand forecasting, sensor networks for soil and crop monitoring, precision agriculture and the role of digital technology in Blue Ocean Strategy. In effect, FAI is linking India’s future food-grain targets with technological modernization of fertilizer management and farm data systems.