AI-powered “Green Intelligence” emerges as India’s next agricultural revolution driver

As India advances its digital transformation, artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging as a strategic force in agriculture, a sector that employs nearly half the nation’s workforce and suffers annual climate-related losses exceeding ₹60,000 crore. At the forefront of this transformation is ANNAM.AI, a centre of excellence at IIT Ropar supported by the Ministry of Education, which is championing a new concept of “Green Intelligence.” Green Intelligence refers to the use of AI to convert extensive agricultural data, including weather, soil, pest, and market indicators — into real-time, hyper-local actionable advisories for farmers, delivered in their native languages via the Annam Chat Engine (ACE). Unlike commercial agri-tech tools, ANNAM.AI positions itself as a public-purpose infrastructure, built on curated datasets and designed for integration with government systems such as Bharat Vistaar, the digital backbone for Indian agriculture.  Initial pilots indicate that farmers using ANNAM.AI advisories can achieve 10–20% yield improvements, lower input costs by 8–12%, and reduce avoidable crop losses. State agricultural departments are also benefiting from improved visibility into pest outbreaks and climatic risks, enabling faster, data-driven interventions.  ACE’s multilingual capabilities address India’s linguistic diversity, over 22 official languages and 1,600 dialects — expanding access to precision agriculture. ANNAM.AI’s leadership highlights that the challenge is not data availability but the usability of...