Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture: WEF’s New Blueprint

Highlights Today — PETAL 020
Posted on : 15 November 2025

🌱 Thematic Focus:

GS3 — Agriculture | Deep-Tech | AI-Driven Farming

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Intro Whisper

When the plough meets the pixel, agriculture becomes not just a tradition — but a transformation.

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Key Highlights

1) WEF’s Landmark Deep-Tech Agriculture Report

The World Economic Forum (WEF), working with global industry and academia, has released ‘Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture’, a major insights report that maps how emerging technologies can future-proof global farming systems.

2) Seven Deep-Tech Domains Identified

The report highlights seven breakthrough technologies that can dramatically reshape agriculture:

• Generative AI: Predictive models for pests, yield, labour, market trends.
• Computer Vision: Image-based disease detection, sorting, grading, real-time crop health monitoring.
• Edge IoT: Local data processing for irrigation, fertilisation, pest-control — even in low-connectivity zones.
• Satellite Remote Sensing: Soil moisture, crop stress, drought mapping, supply-chain risk alerts.
• Robotics & Drones: Automated planting, spraying, weeding, harvesting; precision operations; swarm robotics.
• CRISPR Gene Editing: Faster development of resilient, high-yield, low-emission crop varieties.
• Nanotechnology: Targeted nutrients/pesticides; high-efficiency micro-inputs; reduced agrochemical waste.

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3) The Problem Statement

WEF warns of three accelerating threats:

• Rising rural-to-urban migration
• Intensifying climate extremes
• Severe soil & water degradation

Together, they endanger productivity, farmer incomes, and global food security.

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4) Indian Case Studies Highlighted by WEF

India is featured prominently with breakthrough examples:

• CRISPR Rice by ICAR: Drought & salinity tolerant, lower emissions, higher yield.
• PMFBY Remote Sensing: Drones + satellite + mobile apps → faster, transparent crop-loss assessment.
• AI-Based Pest Surveillance: ML models predict infestation patterns enabling early intervention.

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5) Global Initiative: AI4AI

The report is released under the WEF’s Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture Initiative (AI4AI), launched in 2021 to push emerging tech adoption for sustainable, inclusive agriculture.

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6) Government of India Initiatives (Aligned With Deep-Tech)

India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)

A federated farmers’ database enabling innovation by startups, agri-tech firms, and state agencies.

NeGP-A

Funding support for projects using AI, ML, drones, robotics, blockchain, and big data.

e-NAM

A unified digital market connecting 1,000+ mandis for transparent, efficient trading.

ICAR Mobile Apps

100+ apps offering farm advisories across crops, livestock, poultry, fisheries.

Soil Health Card Scheme

Customized nutrient recommendations based on field-level soil profiling.

Kisan e-Mitra

A voice-enabled AI chatbot for PM-Kisan-related queries.

National Pest Surveillance System

AI & ML models for climate-driven pest prediction.

Namo Drone Didi

Distribution & training of women-led drone operators for precision agriculture.

PMKSY

Drip irrigation + fertigation for precision nutrient delivery & efficient urea usage.

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GS Paper Mapping

• GS3 – Agriculture: Precision farming, soil health, crop resilience.
• GS3 – Science & Tech: AI, Robotics, IoT, CRISPR, Nanotech.
• GS3 – Environment: Sustainable farming, climate adaptation.
• GS2 – Governance: Policy frameworks, Digital Agriculture Ecosystem.

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Closing Thought

Agriculture cannot remain trapped between the monsoon and the market. When farmers hold devices as confidently as they hold seeds, a new revolution begins — one that grows food, data, and dignity together.

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High Quality Mains Essay For Practice : Essay-1

Word Limit 1000-1200

Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture: The WEF Vision and India’s Pathway to Future Farming

Agriculture today stands at a decisive threshold. As global food demand accelerates and climate stress deepens, conventional farming is proving insufficient to sustain the needs of a rapidly expanding population. Soil fatigue, water scarcity, rural migration, and erratic weather events have created vulnerabilities that can no longer be addressed through incremental improvements alone. It is in this context that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has released its landmark insights report, “Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture,” a blueprint that combines frontier technologies with systemic reforms to build a resilient and future-ready farming ecosystem. The report is not merely a technological catalogue—it is a strategic call to reimagine agriculture as a digitally empowered, data-driven, sustainable enterprise.

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A New Era of Deep-Tech Agriculture

The WEF identifies seven core deep-tech domains that promise to reshape agriculture at its very foundations. These technologies are not stand-alone tools; they function as interconnected layers that enable precision, prediction, automation, and sustainability.

1. Generative AI (GenAI): Beyond Information to Intelligent Farming

Generative AI offers powerful predictive insights—from pest outbreaks to yield fluctuations, labour needs, and market price behaviour. Language and vision models built on real-time and historical datasets can guide farmers on optimal sowing windows, fertilizer dosing, disease risks, and crop diversification strategies. Used at scale, GenAI can reduce uncertainties that have burdened farmers for decades.

2. Computer Vision: The Eyes of Modern Farming

High-resolution imaging and video analytics allow early detection of leaf discoloration, soil nutrient deficiencies, fruit defects, or water stress. Whether deployed through drones, smartphones, or automated grading lines, computer vision brings laboratory-like diagnosis directly into the field, saving precious time and enabling targeted action.

3. Edge IoT: The Brain Operating at the Farm Itself

Edge computing enables sensors, pumps, and irrigation units to make decisions locally, without relying on distant servers or strong internet bandwidth. This is critical for India, where many agricultural regions still face connectivity challenges. Edge IoT can autonomously regulate water flow, activate pest deterrent devices, or apply fertilizers precisely based on real-time soil metrics.

4. Satellite-Enabled Remote Sensing: The Bird’s-Eye Guardian

Satellite data provides an unmatched macro-view—tracking moisture stress, drought probability, vegetation health, river basin flow, or cyclone impact. When combined with mobile apps and district dashboards, remote sensing transforms agricultural planning, crop monitoring, and disaster response.

5. Robotics, Drones, and Autonomous Systems: Labour and Precision Combined

With rural labour shortages worsening across the world, robotics emerges as a crucial solution. Autonomous tractors, robotic weeders, sunlight-guided harvesters, and swarm drones can perform repetitive and hazardous tasks with high accuracy. Drones, now increasingly used even by small and marginal farmers in India, ensure optimal spraying, mapping, and damage assessment.

6. CRISPR and Gene Editing: Breeding the Future

Traditional breeding cycles often take decades. CRISPR technology drastically shortens this timeline, enabling scientists to cultivate crops that are drought-tolerant, salinity-resistant, pest-resilient, and climate-adaptive. India’s ICAR has already demonstrated success with CRISPR-based rice varieties offering higher yields and lower emissions.

7. Nanotechnology: Precision at the Molecular Level

Nano-fertilizers and nano-pesticides allow targeted delivery, minimize environmental runoff, and enhance nutrient uptake. This can reduce India’s chronic overdependence on urea and excessive pesticide usage, both of which degrade soil and water bodies.

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The Crisis Deepening Beneath the Soil

The WEF report highlights that the urgency for deep-tech transformation is not optional—it is existential.

• Climate extremes are intensifying droughts, heatwaves, and unpredictable rainfall.
• Soil degradation is reaching alarming levels due to chemical overuse and monocropping.
• Water scarcity threatens irrigation coverage in several regions.
• Rural-to-urban migration is leaving farms without adequate labour.
• Global food inflation and supply chain disruptions are putting unprecedented pressure on small farmers.

These disruptions together form a systemic crisis. The report argues that no single policy or traditional technique can counter these challenges at the required scale. Only deep-tech—working across data, genetics, automation, and nano-solutions—can create resilient pathways for the future.

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India as a Case Study in Deep-Tech Adoption

The report highlights India as a unique example because its agricultural challenges are vast, yet the country has rapidly built an enabling technological ecosystem.

ICAR’s CRISPR Rice

A breakthrough innovation from ICAR has produced a rice variety tolerant to drought and salinity—crucial for climate-threatened states like Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. The variety also has lower methane emissions, contributing to India’s climate commitments.

PMFBY: Drone + Satellite + AI Integration

The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana now integrates drone footage, satellite data, and mobile-based crop-cutting experiments to ensure transparent and fast claim settlements, reducing delay-driven distress among farmers.

AI-Powered Pest Surveillance

The government’s National Pest Surveillance System uses machine learning to predict pest outbreaks, enabling early warnings and rapid action.

Kisan e-Mitra

This AI-powered voice assistant allows farmers—even those who cannot read or write—to receive guidance on PM-Kisan benefits, cropping advice, and subsidy procedures.

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Government of India’s Parallel Efforts

The WEF report aligns strongly with India’s existing digital agriculture architecture.

• IDEA (India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture): Unified farmers’ database enabling targeted advisories, credit access, insurance, and agri-startups.
• NeGP-A: Funding for state-led projects using AI, blockchain, ML, sensors, robotics, and drone technology.
• e-NAM: India’s agricultural markets are now on a digital platform that allows remote bidding and price transparency.
• Soil Health Cards: Farmers receive individualized guidance to correct nutrient imbalances.
• Namo Drone Didi: A unique initiative empowering rural women to operate agricultural drones—combining technology with gender empowerment.
• PMKSY: Drip and fertigation systems ensure precise water and nutrient delivery.

Together, these initiatives create a strong national foundation for deep-tech integration at massive scale.

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Why Deep-Tech Matters Now More Than Ever

The world is moving towards:

• Higher climate volatility
• Shrinking farmlands per capita
• Rising global food demand
• Increasing environmental degradation

Conventional farming cannot keep pace. Deep-tech tools—predictive analytics, autonomous machines, nano-fertilizers, CRISPR crop genetics—offer the only viable path to increased productivity with lower ecological footprints.

Deep-tech also addresses structural issues like rural labour shortages, inefficient input use, and lack of real-time information. It democratizes knowledge by making expert-level insights accessible to every farmer through apps, sensors, and voice assistants.

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Conclusion: A Future Where Plough Meets Processor

The WEF report is not merely a technological roadmap—it is an agricultural philosophy for the 21st century. It envisions farms where decisions are data-informed, crops are climate-resilient, inputs are precision-targeted, and farmers are empowered by digital tools rather than constrained by uncertainties.

For India, the deep-tech revolution aligns with its broader goals of doubling farmer incomes, ensuring food security, and achieving climate sustainability. The convergence of global innovation and domestic digital initiatives has prepared India to lead a new farming movement—one driven by intelligence, inclusivity, and resilience.

The future of agriculture will not be built by abandoning the plough, but by giving it a companion: the processor. And when both work together, agriculture transforms from a vulnerable enterprise into a future-ready force capable of feeding the world.

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High Quality Mains Essay For Practice : Essay-2 Literary Essay

Word Limit 1000-1200

Where Soil Meets the Circuit: A Meditation on Deep-Tech and the Indian Farmer

“The plough is never merely a tool. It is a memory of the first human hope, cutting into the earth, asking it to dream with us.”

There was a time when the Indian farmer stood alone beneath an unpredictable sky, relying on intuition as old as the soil itself. Seasons arrived like guests who did not always keep their word. Rains faltered. Pests emerged without warning. A lifetime of labour could be undone by one whisper of wind or one sleepless night spent watching the clouds refuse to break. Agriculture, for centuries, was a dialogue between man and nature—tender, uncertain, often unequal.

But somewhere along this vast journey, a quiet revolution began. It did not start with slogans or manifestos, but with signals, sensors, satellite streaks, and encrypted whispers travelling through invisible networks. It began when the world realised that feeding the future would require more than tradition. It would require intelligence—not just human intelligence, but intelligence that listens, learns, and evolves. It would require deep-tech.

The World Economic Forum’s report, “Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture,” reads almost like a prophecy—an announcement that the plough is about to meet its newest companion: the processor. And in this companionship lies the future of farming.

Imagine a field where the soil itself can speak. Sensors embedded in the earth track moisture like a living pulse, sending data to small devices perched under neem trees. Algorithms read the heartbeat of the land. Drones drift above like silent guardians, mapping disease, counting leaves, measuring stress with the precision of a surgeon. Satellites circle the planet, watching for drought, for floods, for shifting patterns of green and brown. And in a small home whose roof glimmers under the sun of Odisha, a farmer receives these signals through a mobile phone—not in English, not in code, but in the comfort of his own language.

This is not science fiction. This is the present. And it is arriving faster than we imagined.

Deep-tech does not replace the farmer; it restores him. It gives him time. It gives him warning. It gives him a chance. In a world where rains betray and markets fluctuate, data becomes a shield. Robotics becomes a companion. CRISPR becomes a silent innovator in the background, strengthening seeds like an artisan strengthening clay. Nanotechnology brings precision to a world where wastage once seemed inevitable. Generative AI brings foresight to a profession once defined by uncertainty.

But technology alone cannot heal what has been wounded. Soil degradation, rural migration, shrinking water tables—these are not challenges that can be solved by microchips alone. What deep-tech does is more subtle, more profound. It builds resilience. It helps the farmer endure without surrendering his dignity. It brings predictability to fields that have known centuries of unpredictability. It makes agriculture not a gamble, but a craft.

India appears again and again in the WEF report—not as an observer, but as a pioneer. CRISPR-based rice developed by ICAR, digital advisories powered by IDEA, PMFBY using satellites and drones for faster claim settlements, the rise of AI-powered pest surveillance, the voice-guided Kisan e-Mitra that speaks to farmers in a tone gentle enough to be trusted—these are signs that India is not waiting for the future; India is shaping it.

Yet the real transformation lies in the heart of the farmer. For technology is not magic until someone believes in it. There is something almost poetic about watching a woman in Rajasthan, standing in an open field, commanding a drone under the Namo Drone Didi scheme. The dry wind moves her saree, the drone hums above like a futuristic bird, and in that moment the ancient and the modern co-exist without conflict. She is not replacing tradition; she is extending it.

And what is agriculture but extension? Extension of soil into nourishment, of effort into life, of tradition into time.

The deep-tech revolution does more than modernise agriculture—it spiritualises it. It allows the farmer to read the land with new senses. It allows science to serve humility. It allows innovation to meet intuition in the middle. For the plough may cut the soil, but technology now listens to it.

As climate change tightens its grip on the world, and as the earth’s wounds deepen, the old ways alone cannot carry us forward. Neither can technology alone. But together—deep-tech and deep-rooted wisdom—something extraordinary becomes possible. Farming becomes not an act of survival, but an act of renewal.

There is a beautiful symmetry here. Agriculture began as the first technology of humankind. Today, it turns to the latest technologies to survive. The circle closes with dignity.

The future farm will not look like the past. But it will honour the same sentiment—the desire to nurture life. The desire to protect the seed. The desire to harmonise with the earth rather than conquer it. Deep-tech is not a threat to this sentiment; it is its extension into a world that has grown more uncertain.

And if one day, a farmer stands in his field, looks at his crop, and feels the rare comfort of knowing that the land, the sky, the data, and the machines are finally on his side—that will be the moment the deep-tech revolution will have fulfilled its promise.

“When we listen to the earth with new tools, we do not lose our roots; we help them reach deeper.”

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