India is an agrarian country, and farmers are the backbone of this agriculture system. Now, when India is stepping ahead in all sectors of economy, agriculture is still lagging behind. Farmers are struggling for a minimum standard of living due to non-availability of basic infrastructure and natural calamities. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 10,349 persons involved in farming sector (consisting of 5,763 farmers or cultivators and 4,586 agricultural labourers) committed suicide during 2018, accounting for 7.7% of total suicide (134,516) victims. In this light, it is impertinent to see the current agricultural policies in place aiming to revive the status of farmers in India. Supply of low quality and spurious inputs is an important factor for increased cost without adequate gain in productivity. In this chapter, effort has been made to know how blockchain technology can improve the agricultural sector as well as the condition of farmers in India.
TopIntroduction
Adverse climate, long-term environmental degradation, and cost increases in the input and commodity markets are all risks to farmers around the world. Furthermore, peasant farm households face many obstacles, both natural (soil quality, precipitation, etc.) and human (infrastructure, fiscal policies, marketing, information, and innovation). Better credit, better quality, and less expensive data sources are required for harvests, provide valuable weather information to agricultural producers for the suspicious design of their crop yields, eliminate intermediaries by connecting farmers directly to consumers/retailers, and improve cultivating productivity to ensure farmers' budgetary strength are all goals of an e-agriculture scenario (Alam, 2020). The development of information and communication technology (ICT) over the last decade has opened up a slew of new options for overcoming some of agriculture's challenges. Growing use of mobile-broadband access devices, the Internet - of - things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicles, communications protocol, potential for big data analytics, and AI i.e., artificial intelligence, among other technological advancements, have created crucial tools and technologies for agricultural stakeholders to develop production, marketing, and development processes. (Ahmad, 2021), e.g. When it comes to ICT technology used by farmers, the Imperial Tobacco Company of India (ITC) Ltd.'s e-Choupal initiative, which connects directly with rural farmers via the Internet for the announcement of agriculture and aquaculture products such as Soyabean wheat coffee and prawns, is a good example. Similarly, in rural India, the performance enhancing Web access kiosks to provide farmers with access to marketing and agricultural information, allowing them to make better-informed decisions and potentially boost their revenue by better matching farm produce to market demand (Trendov, 2020).
Blockchain technology is a hybrid of ancient and modern technologies that have been restructured. When we mention “block” and “chain,” we're referring to digital data (the “block”) that is stored in a public database (the “chain”). On the blockchain, “blocks” are made up of digital information. As the name implies, blockchain is made up of a series of interconnected blocks. It is a distributed ledger for preserving the history of a digital transaction that is shared and unchanged cryptographically. On the blockchain system, each participant (stakeholder) stores copies of all past transactions ever conducted using the provided system. However, the fact that a party/node has no single owner suggests that it is not a centralized system (Laurence, 2019). When Blockchain technology was announced through the paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, it was an innovative mix of public key cryptography (invented in the 1970s), cryptographic hash functions (born in the 1970s) and proof-of-work invented in the 1990s (Nakamoto, 2008). A variety of financial technology (FinTech) applications, distributed leisure technology (DLT) applications with peer-to-peer electronic cash transactions and more than thousands of crypto currencies are being used for Blockchain. The most famous crypto currency is Bitcoin. Blockchain has now shifted from electronic cash to other applications in government, supply chain management, healthcare, agriculture, real estate international development and almost any database application that can be replaced with a safer, persistent, responsive, accessible and trust-based database (Sam Goundar, 2020) The main objective of this chapter is to analyze the mindset of different stakeholders, to technology in general, involved in the agricultural sector and to illustrate how smart contracts of blockchain can provide an electronic record of a product's background to the retail store. This will give buyers more trust in the goods they purchase, and it is also an opportunity to reward farmers who grow their produce using good and sustainable agricultural practices (Swan, 2015).