E-Gov: Smart governments, smart solutions; how Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh are looking to enhance productivity

The government of Karnataka has decided to partner US tech giant Microsoft to use artificial intelligence (AI) for digital agriculture. The collaboration intends to empower smallholder farmers with technology-oriented solutions that will help them increase income using ground-breaking, cloud-based technologies, machine learning and advanced analytics. The collaboration will experiment with the Karnataka Agricultural Price Commission (KAPC), department of agriculture to help improve price forecasting practices to benefit farmers. Microsoft, with guidance from KAPC, is attempting to develop a multi-variant agricultural commodity price forecasting model considering the following datasets--historical sowing area, production, yield, weather datasets and other related datasets as relevant. For this season, Tur crop has been identified for this prediction model.