Jharkhand has become the first state in the country to distribute seeds through blockchain technology to arrest the unhealthy trend of spurious seeds entering markets and landing farmers in losses.

“We are the first state in the country to use the blockchain system to measure the progress and implementation of government schemes, especially seed distribution. This will play a crucial role in the transparent execution of schemes. There will be a crackdown on middlemen. It is the utmost priority of this government to make quality seeds available to the farmers at the right time. Last year, the Telangana government had started the blockchain technology on a pilot basis for seed distribution. But we rolled it out for all the agriculture schemes,” Jharkhand agriculture director Nisha Oraon said.

Oraon said that in the Kharif season 1,01,065 farmers had been registered in the blockchain-based seed traceability platform.

“A total of 123 farmer producer organisations (FPOs) have been registered. The registration process is still in progress. Through this system, along with seeds, the benefits of other government agriculture schemes will also be provided to the registered farmers and FPOs. An OTP will be sent to the registered mobile of the farmers, through which the distribution shall be confirmed,” Oraon said.

This system is being employed to issue supply orders from the agriculture directorate and district agriculture officers for seed distribution and to trace the supply of seeds from seed producing agencies to godowns.

“This will enable timely supply of seeds to testing laboratories, distributors, retailers and most importantly, the farmers. The objective of implementing blockchain is to bring about transparency and authenticity in the distribution of benefits of the schemes. In the seed distribution process, this tracking system will provide transparent information about the seed purchase, seed type, details on warehouse and suppliers, seed supply, stock, selection of godowns, vehicle carrying seeds and weight, among other information. Along with this, the empanelled seed supplier under this system will be able to track the movement of seeds including details of the supply order received, receipt issued by the warehouse, status of supply by various unique identifiers including QR codes,” Oraon added.

Through the blockchain-based seed traceability platform, seed distribution centres will be able to share their experience with the system through the learning centre and will be connected with the farmers’ system to interact with the competent authority to ensure timely dissemination of information and quality maintenance of the supply chain of seeds, access and quality of seeds to farmers. This will help in providing more robust infrastructure towards seed distribution programmes in the state. Also, this system shall create a database, which will map each farmer to the benefits and the schemes that they have availed.

The seeds’ demand has increased almost four times compared to last year because of timely availability of seeds. Total seed distributed in the Kharif season rose 75 per cent. Seed prices have come down by four to 16 per cent compared with the previous year because of the empanelment of the new government seed agency.