Union Budget 2026–27 has allocated Rs 1,62,671 crore to agriculture and allied activities, a 7% increase over the 2025-26 revised estimate, signifying a continued focus on farmer progress, food security, and data-driven technology.The Budget has also strengthened the shift towards digital and data-driven governance and at the forefront of this transition is Bharat-VISTAAR (Virtually Integrated System to Access Agricultural Resources) – a multilingual, AI-powered advisory platform envisaged to bridge information gaps and deliver personalised farm guidance. With an allocation of Rs 150 crore for its implementation, Bharat-VISTAAR is one of India’s most ambitious initiatives for converting fragmented agricultural data into actionable insights.Often, schemes and welfare benefits in India fail to reach eligible farmers due to lack of timely information and procedural clarity. Arguably, this is due to the under-resourced and fragmented agricultural extension system that reaches only about half of the farmers. The current extension-worker-to-farmer ratio is below 1:5000 (as against the national guideline of 1:1100 in irrigated areas, 1:750 in rainfed areas, and 1:400 in hilly areas), which limits timely access to scientific advice, especially for the small and marginal farmers.A case in point is the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), which, despite witnessing a rise in enrolment (4.19 crore farmers enrolled in 2024–25), is able to cover only about one‑fifth to one‑quarter of India’s gross cropped area, indicating suboptimal risk protection. Studies on the scheme reveal an uneven uptake and attribute it to limited farmer awareness, delayed or disputed claim settlements, complex and error‑prone implementation processes, and low trust in insurers and loss assessments—issues that stem from the insufficiency of India’s agricultural extension system.In 2024, the government approved the Digital Agriculture Mission under which a digital public infrastructure for agriculture ‘Agristack’ is being rolled out to streamline schemes and subsidies, improve access to credit and insurance, and enable tailored crop advisory and market-related information.Bharat-VISTAAR is proposed as a unified digital ecosystem that will integrate the Agristack digital records with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) ‘package of practices’ (crop- and region-specific guidelines issued by ICAR for enhancing productivity) to provide multilingual, customised advisories on weather, soil health, and pest management to farmers.The platform can thus allay the current concerns by empowering farmers with real-time, multilingual information on insurance procedures, weather risks, and claim status. Low yields and inefficient use of inputs (such as seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides) also pose problems as they raise the cost of production significantly for farmers.The merging of ICAR’s scientific research with farm-level data through Bharat-VISTAAR can offer pertinent recommendations on input timing and dosage, thereby increasing the efficiency of inputs. This would shift the focus from maximising the output to improving resource and cost efficiency, and hence net returns in the long run.But scaling up a digital infrastructure for the agriculture sector in India is challenging due to fragmented landholdings, exclusion of landless farmers from databases, inconsistent data sources, unclear land ownership, legal disputes, and limited digital literacy at the grassroots level.The viability of this initiative, therefore, hinges as much on the sophistication of technology as on the ground-level relevance of services. While the proposed integration will enable informed decision-making by farmers, providing guidance that is truly customised would require data granularity. Unless the platform delivers precise crop- and location-specific recommendations, it risks replicating the limitations of the traditional extension system, just scaled up digitally.Farmer producer organisations/farmer producer companies (FPOs/FPCs) can play a critical role here, having demonstrated success in representing farmer interests through aggregation of inputs, access to markets, and engagement with government schemes. There is evidence that FPOs can be instrumental in maintaining verified member records on land use, crops, inputs, and yields, and operating platforms on behalf of digitally constrained members. They can thus serve as credible intermediaries, standardising and validating field data before it enters national platforms.Alongside their integration into Bharat-VISTAAR, efforts to design a micro-level, customised interface for FPOs/ FPCs should also be taken up to support efficient operational functions that simplify administrative work such as tracking member production, supporting collective decision-making, enabling bulk input procurement, and strengthening negotiations with buyers, lenders, and insurers.However, even the most accurate advice may fail to translate on the ground in instances where legacy policy incentives such as minimum support price or urea subsidies create lock-ins that constrain farmer choices. So, to be able to go beyond delivering incremental benefits and unlock systems change, Bharat-VISTAAR should be designed as much as a policy-feedback instrument as a farmer-advisory tool.This ambition, in turn, depends critically on farmers’ consent for and trust in data sharing, particularly as private partnerships expand, making ethical, transparent, and legally responsible data governance central to the platform’s credibility.Bhavya A P is a senior associate and Kaveri Ashok is a research scientist in the Sustainability group at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), a research-based think tank.