Agri-digitalization refers to applying digital technologies, such as digital platforms, big-data analytics, cloud computing, and sensors, to leverage computational advantages in extracting, processing, and converting data into actionable insights for agriculture. The Indian government has been promoting agri-digitalization for a while, often termed Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture. DPI in agriculture essentially entails the creation of an Agri Stack, a comprehensive farmer database with details on land, crops, cropping patterns, livestock, and other related information. The Stack will be a consolidated platform for AgTech startups, agri-value chain enterprises, government programs, and banks to access and utilize farmer data to create a wide range of digital solutions for advisory services, input procurement, market connectivity, benefit transfer, and credit accessibility. The concept of commons, on the other hand, is often understood as shared resources. The resource can be tangible, as in the case of natural resource commons. Still, it can also be intangible resources such as knowledge that came into existence via social production. Here, our focus is on the intangible commons: the Agri Stack. We term the Agri Stack as Digital Agricultural Commons, which results from the social production process between several actors, primarily farmers. We have employed a pluralistic methodology, including primary and secondary data, to understand how the creation of Agri Stack is a social process in which human-human, human-nature, human-policy, and human-technology interactions create digital agri-commons. We also show that these interactions are mediated by several actors such as CSOs, governments, and business entities, and reconfigure existing social relations. Nonetheless, as is the case for any commons, the threat of enclosure looms large here. Therefore, our paper suggests policy implications to emphasize the ‘use value’ to keep the Agri Stack within the commons instead of taking it into closed, proprietary systems that focus more on ‘exchange value’.
