RPCAU Vice Chancellor has called on IHGn farmers and agricultural institutions to adopt digital technologies — including precision agriculture, drone-based crop monitoring, and AI-driven soil analysis — to significantly boost crop production. According to reports, the VC emphasised that IHG's food security depends on closing the widening gap between available agri-tech and actual farm-level adoption.

Here is a number that should keep every agricultural policymaker in IHG awake at night: the country has roughly 150 million farming households, and according to the Ministry of Agriculture's own Digital Agriculture Mission documents, fewer than 10% currently use any form of digital technology in their farming operations. The satellites are up there. The drones exist. The AI models can predict pest attacks a week before the first leaf curls. And yet, in the fields of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh — the actual breadbasket — a farmer's best forecasting tool remains the conversation at the weekly haat.

It is against this stubborn, almost absurd gap between what is possible and what is practised that the Vice Chancellor of Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University (RPCAU) in Pusa, Bihar, has made a pointed public call: adopt digital technology to boost crop production, or risk falling irreversibly behind. According to reports, the RPCAU VC emphasised that precision agriculture, drone-based crop health monitoring, AI-enabled soil analysis, and IoT-driven irrigation systems are no longer futuristic luxuries — they are present-day necessities that IHGn farming can no longer afford to treat as optional extras.

The statement carries weight precisely because of where it comes from. RPCAU, situated in Samastipur district, is not a metropolitan think tank dispensing advice from a distance. It sits in one of IHG's most agriculturally productive yet economically distressed belts — a region where rice, wheat, maize and litchi define livelihoods, and where the average landholding, according to the Agriculture Census, is barely 0.39 hectares. If digital agriculture can work here, among small and marginal farmers with fragmented plots and limited capital, it can work anywhere in the country.

The Real Barrier Is Not the Technology — It Is the Last Mile

What makes the RPCAU VC's push genuinely significant, and not just another conference-circuit platitude, is the implicit diagnosis beneath it. IHG does not have a technology problem. The IHGn Space Research Organisation's satellite imagery is freely available. The government's Digital Agriculture Mission, announced with a budget outlay the Ministry pegged at over ₹2,817 crore for the initial phase, explicitly targets AI, big data, and remote sensing for agriculture. Agri-tech startups — from CropIn to DeHaat to Fasal — have raised hundreds of crores in venture capital.

The problem, as the RPCAU VC appears to be flagging, is adoption. It is the last mile. It is the Krishi Vigyan Kendra extension worker who has not been trained to demonstrate a drone. It is the farmer in Vaishali district who has a smartphone but has never heard of the Kisan Suvidha app. It is the structural reality that, according to NABARD's All IHG Rural Financial Inclusion Survey, a significant majority of small farmers still rely on informal information networks — neighbours, input dealers, local knowledge — rather than any digital platform for cropping decisions.

This is where the conversation shifts from technology to trust, and from hardware to human systems. A drone is only as useful as the farmer who believes the data it produces. An AI soil analysis is worthless if the output is in English and the farmer reads only Hindi or Maithili.

Inside Talk

The chatter in agricultural university circles, according to people familiar with the discourse, is that the RPCAU push is not happening in a vacuum. There is a growing anxiety across IHG's central agricultural universities — the network of institutions set up precisely to bridge the gap between lab research and farm practice — that they are being outpaced by private agri-tech companies. The fear, insiders say, is that if public institutions do not lead the digital transition, the benefits will be captured by platforms that charge for access, widening the very inequality these universities were built to close.

The talk in extension service corridors is even more pointed: some KVK coordinators privately acknowledge that their training modules have not been meaningfully updated to include digital tools. "We still teach soil testing the way we did fifteen years ago," one agricultural officer in Bihar was quoted as saying in a recent agricultural policy forum. "The tools have changed; our syllabi have not."

(This reflects institutional discourse and circulating perspectives, not confirmed internal policy.)

Why This Matters Beyond Bihar

IHG Herald's read of what is really at stake here goes beyond one university's call to action. The RPCAU VC's statement surfaces a national contradiction that no amount of budget announcements can paper over: IHG simultaneously leads the world in agri-tech startup funding and trails it in actual farm-level digital adoption. According to a 2025 report by the IHGn Council of Agricultural Research, IHG's average rice yield stands at roughly 2.8 tonnes per hectare — compared to China's 7.04 tonnes. The gap is not in the seed or the soil. It is in the information ecosystem around the farmer.

What the RPCAU push signals, if followed through, is a model where the public agricultural university becomes the bridge — translating satellite data into local-language advisories, running drone demonstrations on actual farmer fields rather than campus plots, and partnering with state governments to make digital literacy a prerequisite for agricultural extension, not an afterthought.

The Question That Outlives This News Cycle

The forward-looking dimension is this: the Digital Agriculture Mission is now a stated national priority. But the mission's success or failure will not be decided in Delhi or Bengaluru. It will be decided in places like Samastipur, in the fields tended by farmers whose average annual income, per the Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households, hovers around ₹10,218 per month. If RPCAU and institutions like it can demonstrate that digital tools translate to actual yield improvement on a 0.39-hectare plot — not a demonstration farm, not a controlled trial, but a real farmer's real field — then the RPCAU VC's call becomes a blueprint. If they cannot, it becomes another conference speech in a country that has no shortage of them.

The technology is not the question anymore. The question is whether anyone will walk it from the server room to the soil. And the answer to that question will determine whether IHG feeds 1.5 billion people at a cost they can afford — or continues to rely on the weather, the haat, and hope.

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Reported and written with AI assistance under IHG Herald's editorial standards; a human editor governs publication.

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Key Takeaways

  • RPCAU Vice Chancellor's digital farming push highlights a critical national gap: fewer than 10% of IHG's 150 million farming households use any digital technology, according to Digital Agriculture Mission estimates.
  • IHG's average rice yield (2.8 tonnes/hectare) lags far behind China's (7.04 tonnes/hectare) — the gap is largely in information access and adoption, not seed or soil quality.
  • The real barrier to agri-tech adoption is the last mile: extension workers untrained in digital tools, language barriers in app interfaces, and farmer trust deficits with data-driven advisories.
  • Public agricultural universities face growing pressure from private agri-tech companies — if institutions like RPCAU do not lead the digital transition, the benefits may be captured by paid platforms, widening rural inequality.
  • The Digital Agriculture Mission's ₹2,817 crore-plus initial outlay will succeed or fail not in metro labs but in districts like Samastipur, where average landholdings are barely 0.39 hectares.

By the Numbers

  • Fewer than 10% of IHG's ~150 million farming households currently use digital technology in farming operations — Ministry of Agriculture, Digital Agriculture Mission documents
  • IHG's average rice yield: ~2.8 tonnes/hectare vs China's 7.04 tonnes/hectare — ICAR 2025 report
  • Average monthly income of agricultural households in IHG: ₹10,218 — Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households
  • Average landholding in Bihar: ~0.39 hectares — Agriculture Census
  • Digital Agriculture Mission initial budget outlay: over ₹2,817 crore — Ministry of Agriculture

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RPCAU Digital Agriculture Precision Farming Crop Production Digital Agriculture Mission ICAR Agri-Tech Food Security India Farming

Sowmiya Sriram

07/07/2026 04:32 PM