Digital Saathi, a digitally enabled agriculture advisory services and enhanced market access app has been launched for farmers based in 5 districts of Karnataka – Davangere, Bellary, Haveri, Chitradurga and Shimoga. With this the small and marginal farmers will be having easy access to multiple stakeholders such as peer farmers, agri-suppliers, buyers, traders and processors. 6,000 small farmers have already registered in the mobile app. It is expected that at least 30,000 farmers would register in Karnataka by May 2022. A global goal to provide training on sustainable agricultural practices and improved access to markets for 10 million farmers by 2030 has been set. Digital Saathi is a step towards this goal. Through this hyper-localized service platform, the aim is to connect with over 3 million farmers in the next 5 years.
Digital Saathi has been providing farmers digital solutions like discussion forums and information on market price, weather forecasts, pre to post harvest and other related details. From October 2021, the app would have additional features like Crop Input e-commerce and Crop Sell Offer to improve farmers’ access to good quality crop inputs and enable market linkages between them and the aggregators through the digitally enabled marketplace. Digital Saathi is available on basic Android phone with information in Kannada so that farmers do not face any language barrier in decision making.