Who Owns Your Farm Data? A Plain Guide for Indian Farmers

Information about supply is information about price. A trader who knows the sown area for onions across four districts before you do is negotiating with an advantage you cannot see. A lender who knows your yield history can price a loan more accurately — which helps you if your record is good and hurts you if it is not. An input company that knows which villages sowed cotton knows exactly where to send its sales team.

This is ordinary commerce, and some of it genuinely benefits farmers. The asymmetry is the problem: everyone in that list can see your data, and you can see none of theirs. The realistic goal is not secrecy. It is knowing what you have given away, and to whom.

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 applies to farming apps like any other. It gives you a set of rights that are worth knowing by name, because naming them in a support email changes the response you get.

You have the right to know what is collected and why; the right to correct wrong data; the right to withdraw consent you previously gave; and the right to have your data erased. Companies must provide a grievance officer and respond within a defined period. If they do not, you can escalate to the Data Protection Board of India. The right that matters most in practice is withdrawal of consent, because it is the one that actually stops an ongoing collection.

The test is simple: does the app need this to do the thing you opened it for? Location for a local weather forecast passes. Location harvested continuously in the background when you only use the app to check mandi prices does not. Your crop and land size for a sowing plan passes. Your contact list does not, ever, for any farming feature.

Three requests should stop you outright, because no private farming app needs them: your Aadhaar number, your land record documents, and your bank details. Government schemes need those — through government channels. An app that asks is either building something it has not told you about, or collecting what it can because it can.

The largest farm dataset being assembled in India is not being built by an app; it is being built by the government, through the farmer, land and crop registries under AgriStack and the Farmer ID. Enrolment links your identity to your holding and your cropping history, and the framework permits sharing with third parties on consent.

Refusing is not really a practical option, because scheme delivery is moving onto that rail. Awareness is. Ask what you are consenting to at the enrolment camp, ask whether consent can be withdrawn later, and keep your own records regardless — being able to prove what you actually sowed is what protects you when a record disagrees with reality.

We are one of the apps this article is about, so here is our position stated plainly enough to be checked. Khetiyaar collects your phone number, your location if you permit it, and the farm details a plan is built from — crop, soil type, land size, field boundaries you record. We do not collect Aadhaar numbers, land record documents or bank details. We do not sell personal data and we do not run third-party ads. We are independent of any government body and cannot register you for any scheme.

You can withdraw consent, and you can delete your account and its data from within the app under Profile, or by emailing us. Some features stop working without location or farm details — that is a consequence, not a punishment. All of this is set out at our privacy policy, which names a grievance officer as the law requires. If we ever fall short of this page, that is the address to write to.