A pest outbreak rarely begins as a statewide crisis. It can begin with a discolored leaf, an unfamiliar insect, a patch of damaged paddy or other early signs of infestation. Whether it remains isolated depends on how quickly these signs are detected, understood, and acted upon. If the response arrives too late, the risk can move beyond one farm and begin affecting neighboring fields and villages.

For Odisha, the urgency of assessing and responding to pest threats is rooted in the risk of crop loss. Pests and pathogens are estimated to cause 15–25% yield loss in major crops across India and Odisha bears a significant share of this burden. According to the Government of Odisha’s Economic Survey 2025–26, nearly 81% of the population lives in rural areas, where agriculture serves as the primary economic activity. The sector engages around 1.04 crore workers, accounting for 48.6% of the state’s workforce.

While agriculture and allied sectors contribute only about 19.6% directly to Odisha’s gross state value added, their wider economic contribution is significant, making timely information and coordinating support for farmers central to the state’s growth story. Additionally, as 93% of the state’s farming community is constituted by small and marginal farmers the stakes are especially high. These farmers are particularly vulnerable to shocks such as pest attacks, cyclones and droughts, where damage to one season’s crop can swiftly affect their livelihoods and income.

Given this context, it is evident that the challenge at hand is not simply to collect more agricultural data, but to make that data actionable. Pest surveillance offers one clear example of how this can work: a field report on a pest incidence must move quickly through the government system, inform the right decision and return as timely guidance before a localized threat becomes a wider loss.

Identifying Threats Sooner

Since 2017, the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment, Government of Odisha, with support from the Gates Foundation, has built a more connected digital foundation for agricultural services to address this need. A key part of this system is the Krushi Samiksha Kendra (KSK), which uses the ADAPT Decision Support System (DSS), to collate information from across the department and give officials a clearer view of what is happening on the ground.

The system, however, earns its real value only when officers act on what it shows them. Odisha’s pest-surveillance architecture, built on this digital foundation, is a notable example. Village Agricultural Workers use an e-Pest app to report pest incidence from the field. That information is then fed into the government’s monitoring and decision-support systems, helping officials identify patterns, track where a threat is building, and coordinate a response across several administrative levels.

But detecting a threat is only the first step. The value of that information depends on how quickly it can trigger a coordinated response. Once formalized, the response travels back to farmers through frontline workers and channels such as the Krushi Samrudhi Helpline. This creates a stronger link between digital systems and frontline extension, connecting the field-level information with government decision-making and farmer guidance.

When Advice Reaches the Farmer

The farmer-facing side of this architecture is designed to make government services easier to access, connect farmers with timely advice and create a more continuous pathway between information, support and delivery. Several initiatives help make that possible.

In August 2024, the Government of Odisha introduced the Krushi Samrudhi Helpline as its voice-based agricultural advisory service. The service allows farmers to seek guidance on agriculture and government schemes and reaches nearly 80 lakh farmers, extending timely information to those with limited access to smartphones, internet connectivity, and app-based services.

Beyond advisory services, Odisha’s farmer-facing ecosystem also includes Krushak Odisha the state’s unified farmer registry and portal that collates farmer information into a single record. It currently lists nearly 92 lakh beneficiaries across the state. In addition, GO-SUGAM, a Government of Odisha platform provides a single window for farmer-centric schemes and services across agriculture and allied sectors. Farmers and agri-entrepreneurs can use the platform to explore and apply for schemes and services, gain direct visibility of and access to credit, submit relevant information and documents, and track their applications’ progress.

Taken together, these services show how the larger digital architecture reaches the farmer through advice, records and access to government support.

What Odisha’s Experience Shows

For a community that depends closely on each season’s harvest, being able to identify and respond to a threat quickly can have consequences well beyond the field. This is where the Krushi Unnati Sahyogi program plays a vital role. It enables agriculture and horticulture students to pitch in to support extension activities during the Kharif season, helping farmers identify pest threats, adopt preventive measures, and use pesticides safely. In 2024–25, the program engaged more than 1,000 students and reached over 23,000 farmers across nearly 2,800 villages in the state’s 30 districts.

Since 2017, we at the Gates Foundation have been supporting the Government of Odisha’s long-term effort to build a more responsive agricultural system. The larger ambition has been to connect farmer data, services, surveillance and decision-making so agricultural support can become more timely, coordinated and responsive. This experience offers a useful lesson for agricultural digital public infrastructure (DPI) elsewhere: digitizing farmer records is only the starting point. The value of those records lies in connecting information to surveillance, government decision-making, frontline action, and delivery of relevant services to farmers when they need them.

That requires far more than technology. It requires government ownership, clear operating processes, trained frontline workers and systems that can learn from data. When these elements come together, the ecosystem creates a more robust link between farmers, and the information and services they need and to decision-makers who can use real-time data to respond more effectively.

Odisha’s experience proves a simple idea: agricultural DPI earns its value not when data is collected, but when it helps the government see a risk earlier, coordinate a response faster and place useful information in a farmer’s hands to act. For farmers, that means a better chance to protect their crops, improve yields, strengthen incomes and build greater resilience and prosperous livelihoods.