Mr. Sagar Shirke will present his MDP presentation as per the details below:

Date:10th July 2026

Time: 1245 – 1300 hrs.

Mode: Online
https://meet.google.com/eig-styy-gae

Title: AgriStack and the Excluded Farmer: A Field Study of Registration Architecture, Inclusion Gaps, and Benefit Denial in Maharashtra.

Guide: Prof. G. N. Hariharan

Examiner: Prof. Pennan Chinnasamy

Abstract:

India’s AgriStack is a digital public infrastructure system for agriculture, built around four interconnected registries - the Farmer Registry, Land Parcel Registry, Crop Sown Registry, and Soil and Input Registry. It serves as the common eligibility base for major farmer-facing government programmes, including PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, calamity relief, and fertiliser subsidies. Its value has been demonstrated in live deployments: identifying flood-affected farmers in Maharashtra in 2026 for rapid compensation, and enabling targeted fertiliser allocation amid supply disruption caused by the Middle East conflict.

This dissertation examines a significant gap in AgriStack’s implementation in Maharashtra: the exclusion of farmers without formal land titles from the registration system, and the consequences for their access to government programmes. The study is based on twenty in-person farmer interviews across ten villages in Sangamner Taluka, Ahmednagar District, in May 2026.

Seven distinct exclusion types were identified: exclusion of tenants, sharecroppers, and agricultural labourers who hold no land title; inheritance and mutation delays that leave widows and legal heirs without benefits; joint family title complications that reduce benefit access; tenant farmers registered under the landlord’s land record, denying them insurance and calamity compensation; data entry errors that cascade into months of benefit denial; land disputes that freeze records and cut off all scheme access; and women cultivators invisible within registered households where all benefits go to the male account.

The headline finding is that only 4 of 20 respondents - 20% - are fully registered with benefits reaching them correctly. The remaining 80% experience some form of exclusion, error, or denial. A key analytical finding is that AgriStack’s integration of multiple schemes into one eligibility system amplifies this: a single registration failure simultaneously blocks PM-Kisan, crop insurance, calamity relief, and fertiliser subsidy. A conservative estimate suggests an excluded small farmer loses between Rs 17,000 and Rs 35,000 per year in benefits that registered neighbours receive.

Seven recommendations are proposed, including cultivation-based registration alongside land title registration, a fast-track process for agricultural widows, and formally recognising Farmer Producer Organisations as registration agencies for marginalised farmers.

The central conclusion is that AgriStack’s exclusion problem is a governance failure, not a technology failure. The system works well for those inside it. Extending that access to excluded farmers requires deliberate policy choices, not better software.