During her Union Budget 2026 presentation, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday announced the launch of Bharat Vistar – short for Virtually Integrated System to Access Agricultural Resources – a multilingual, AI-powered platform that aims to overhaul the way India’s farming community accesses crop guidance, weather data and market intelligence.
The platform has been allocated ₹150 crore in the Union Budget 2026–27 and is expected to serve as a cornerstone of the government’s broader digital agriculture push.
What Is Bharat Vistar and how will it work?
Bharat Vistar will consolidate India’s fragmented agricultural data ecosystem into a single, farmer-friendly interface. The platform integrates two critical existing infrastructure layers – the AgriStack portals, which hold farmer data, soil maps and land records, and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)’s best-practice packages on crop management and farming techniques. Artificial intelligence will sit on top of these layers to generate customised, actionable advisories.
The platform will deliver guidance on crop planning, soil health, weather forecasts and prevailing market conditions, all in multiple Indian languages. An AI-powered chatbot, Krishi Saathi, will allow farmers to raise queries via voice, text or video. A pilot version of the chatbot is already operational on Telegram in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, currently serving around 4,000 users.
PM Narendra Modi says, “With the Bharat Vistar AI tool, farmers will receive information in their own language, greatly aiding them. Promoting entrepreneurship in fisheries and animal husbandry will create more local employment and self-employment opportunities in villages…”
Why AI? The scale of India’s farming challenge
Agriculture employs roughly 45 percent of India’s workforce and contributes about 18 percent of gross domestic product, yet the sector has long struggled with fragmented information access, unpredictable weather and volatile market prices.
The Agricultural Census paints a stark picture – nearly 86 percent of Indian farmers are small and marginal operators, cultivating less than two hectares of land. For them, income growth cannot come solely from producing more. It must come from producing smarter. That is the gap Bharat Vistar is designed to fill, by turning data into timely, localised guidance that reduces risk and lifts productivity without requiring large capital investment.
Bharat Vistar is part of a larger digital agriculture ecosystem
Bharat Vistar does not stand alone. The Budget 2026–27 packages it alongside a wider set of agri-allied measures aimed at diversification and value-chain strengthening. The government announced dedicated support for high-value crops including coconut, sandalwood, cocoa, cashew and tree nuts, particularly in coastal and hilly regions. A coconut promotion scheme will focus on replacing non-productive trees with improved varieties to raise yields.
Schemes for livestock, dairy and integrated fisheries were also unveiled. The government has framed Bharat Vistar as part of its Viksit Bharat vision, a roadmap aimed at making India a developed nation by 2047. In that context, the platform represents a bet that precision farming, powered by AI and anchored in local language and local knowledge, can be the single most effective way to lift the incomes and resilience of India’s largest employment sector.
