Google is building a digital agri-stack using satellite imagery to enhance farm mapping and financial services. It has begun with a base layer designed to help identify farm boundaries, a senior official announced at Mumbai Tech Week, according to a PTI report.
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Google's Digital Agri-Stack
"Data and analysis of this base layer of the stack can be used in a slew of applications like bettering the subsidy payments, farm insurance or farm loans," Manish Gupta, a senior director at Google DeepMind, was quoted as saying.
"...We have built the first such model that using satellite imagery analysis can now start to identify field boundaries based on usage pattern start to identify what crops are being grown and so on," Gupta reportedly said.
The Aadhaar-Inspired Approach
The model, inspired by UIDAI's Aadhaar, assigns a unique ID to each farm and is designed to serve as the foundational layer of the "digital agri stack," he reportedly added.
Gupta emphasised that startups and agri-tech firms can leverage this data to develop lending, insurance, and subsidy solutions. With 40 percent of India's population engaged in agriculture and farm lending estimated at USD 550 billion, the initiative aims to improve access to formal credit and reduce reliance on informal lenders.
These comments come at a time when Indian banks, including SBI, are exploring satellite-based agri-lending models to enhance efficiency.
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Google's Vaani Project
Separately, Gupta reportedly highlighted the scarcity of Indian-language content online, revealing that although 10 percent of the world's 8 billion people speak Hindi, it accounts for just 0.1 percent of web content. To bridge this gap, Google has launched the "Vaani" project, collecting 14,000 hours of audio data across 80 districts in 59 languages as part of its first phase.
According to the report, he also said that Indians under appreciate the relevance of artificial intelligence (AI) to expand the boundaries of science, and pointed to the work by DeepMind which led to a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
