Kerala creates 11-member, Chief Secretary-led State AgriStack Data Governance Committee for farm sector

Published 31 July 2026 · india

The Kerala government has created a 11-member State AgriStack Data Governance Committee (SADGC) headed by the Chief Secretary which will act as the institutional architecture

The Kerala government has created a 11-member State AgriStack Data Governance Committee (SADGC) headed by the Chief Secretary which will act as the institutional architecture for handling crucial data associated with the State’s agriculture sector. The panel’s constitution is in line with a set of operational guidelines issued by the Union government to State and Union Territories in September 2025 to assume full ownership of the AgriStack operational backbone under the ‘State Core Handover Support’ programme. In the initial phase, the Centre wanted States to discharge “fiduciary, approval and oversight functions” through a committee-based or departmentally anchored mechanism, such as the SADGC.

The Chief Secretary-led panel will function as the empowered body to exercise these functions in Kerala, the Agriculture Department said in a July 25 order. It will act as the “fiduciary custodian of all AgriStack data within the State, held in public trust for farmers and farming communities.” The Union government had conceived AgriStack, which is a digital public infrastructure (DPI), as “a single source of truth for farmer identity, land and their crops.” It was envisioned by the Centre as one of the two pillars of its Digital Agriculture Mission.

AgriStack contains three foundational registries or databases connected with the agriculture sector; a farmers’ registry, geo-referenced village maps, and crop-sown registry. The relevance of an institutional mechanism such as SADGC lies in the fact that the AgriStack data would be leveraged by the government for implementation of agricultural schemes and disbursement of subsidies. The Additional Chief Secretary and Agricultural Production Commissioner will act as the member secretary of the panel. It has as its members secretaries of the Revenue, Law and Electronics and Information Technology departments, the directors of Agriculture, Kerala State IT Mission, Survey and Land Records, and the Kerala State Remote Sensing and Environment Centre, the Land Revenue Commissioner and the State coordinator of the Informatics Centre.

Other duties of the committee include approving or rejecting requests for AgriStack data access and use, prescribing State-specific conditions, safeguards and compliance requirements for data use, and serving as the nodal authority for coordination with the Centre.