Govt expands digital fertiliser tracking system to link farmers

The Government on Sunday said it is broadening a nationwide digital platform that tracks fertiliser from production to retail sale, adding tools to link purchases with individual farmers’ land records and to monitor subsidy payments more closely.

The Integrated Fertilizer Management System (iFMS), run by the Department of Fertilizers with technical support from the National Informatics Centre, already tracks more than 14 crore Aadhaar-linked buyers and over 2,50,000 retailers, and processes about 70 million tonnes of fertiliser sales a year. The system underpins roughly Rs 2 lakh crore in annual fertiliser subsidies.

The department has been developing new dashboards that give officials a consolidated view of production, imports, dispatches, stocks and retail sales at the national, state, district and retailer level, aimed at flagging unusual trends or supply shortfalls earlier, an official statement said.

The Department has also worked to integrate iFMS with farmer, land and crop databases. A pilot integration with Haryana’s Meri Fasal Mera Byora programme, followed by efforts to connect with the federal AgriStack initiative, tested methods for matching fertiliser buyers with land records-work that exposed gaps in the completeness of existing land and crop data.

Building on that work, the department has rolled out a Framework for Fertiliser Sale that links a mobile booking app to the existing point-of-sale network. Under the framework, farmers book fertiliser using an AgriStack-based ID after their land and ownership details are verified, generating a QR code that retailers scan to compare requested and purchased quantities. The framework is being introduced in phases, with the department and participating states studying booking behaviour and consumption patterns before wider rollout. Officials say the data will allow analysis of fertiliser use per hectare, by landholding size, crop and product, and of gaps between what farmers say they need and what they buy.

The department has also introduced a Vehicle Location Tracking System that links dispatch records to real-time vehicle location data, allowing officials to monitor shipments in transit and identify delays, in addition to existing tools that track goods in transit and stock levels.