MahaVISTAAR is an open network by the Department of Agriculture, Government of Maharashtra under the national VISTAAR framework of the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW). This initiative is a major step forward in Maharashtra’s journey to digitally empower farmers with timely, personalised, and trusted access to agricultural services.

MahaVISTAAR has been developed as an open network which brings together various platforms offered by the State for agricultural advisory and services. This infrastructure has been supercharged by the introduction of Generative AI, which enables farmers to search for and receive agri-advisory in a simple to understand manner, in a language of their choice.

Digital solutions in agriculture are growing and showing signs of positive impact, but for a farmer, a number of challenges continue to persist:

• Farming knowledge, especially for new crops, new farming practices, etc. is limited or too complex to perceive.
• The sources of information are siloed and often undiscoverable.
• When information is available, it is up to the farmer to piece them together and make the right decision.

Open networks solve the discovery and access problem by bringing all trusted sources of information together and enabling interoperable communication. Generative AI can then consolidate relevant pieces based on the farmer’s query, and provide simple, concise, contextualised, and location-aware instructions or advice.

The Infrastructure Layer for MahaVISTAAR has been set up using an open network. This approach enables quick and seamless setup of network infrastructure, with easy-to-use adaptors for implementing platforms to integrate swiftly.

The farmer-facing platform is the MahaVISTAAR mobile app and website, integrated with an AI chatbot offered by PoCRA. It aggregates data from various sources like weather, commodity prices from APMCs, etc. While this data is centralized for now, future plans include direct integration of each source with the network.

The network is designed with strong data privacy and security features. All APIs are dual-digitally signed using public-private key infrastructure, and the data flows strictly in a peer-to-peer manner, ensuring it resides only between platforms.

The AI layer solves two critical issues:

• Language barrier
• Complexity of information

The AI layer captures the farmer’s query in natural language (speech or text), translates it to English, and fetches relevant information from the network. Responses are translated back to the farmer's original language and format.

It also simplifies complex, technical data—like weather and market prices—into easy-to-understand advice tailored to the farmer’s context.

The primary drawback of publicly available AI is user uncertainty about the accuracy of responses. MahaVISTAAR addresses this with:

• Prompts generated strictly from trusted advisory sources (e.g., Department of Agriculture, universities, research institutes) to reduce hallucination.
• Clear citation of the information source at the end of every response to build trust.
• Language processing using open-source Indic language models and a vetted glossary to minimize translation errors.

MahaVISTAAR is revolutionising agricultural support in Maharashtra by creating a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) using an open network and AI. It tackles farmer challenges like siloed information and complex data.

By integrating AI, MahaVISTAAR offers multilingual, simplified, and trusted advisory services through a user-friendly app, while ensuring data privacy. It is a scalable model for empowering farmers with actionable agricultural knowledge.