Current Updates from the Press Information Bureau (July 9, 2025)

Digital Advancements Transform Indian Agriculture: DBT Platform 2.0 and NaMo Drone Didi Yojana

In a significant stride towards modernizing Indian agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare launched two groundbreaking initiatives in 2025 - the Centralized Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Platform Version 2.0 and the NaMo Drone Didi Yojana.

Centralized DBT Platform Version 2.0

The upgraded Centralized DBT Platform aims to revolutionize the agricultural subsidy distribution process by enhancing transparency, efficiency, and timeliness. By digitizing the benefit transfer process, it addresses key issues such as manual processing delays and subsidy disbursement bottlenecks. The platform supports Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts, ensuring that benefits reach the rightful beneficiaries accurately, reducing fraud and improving delivery speed.

NaMo Drone Didi Yojana

Empowering rural women is at the heart of the NaMo Drone Didi Yojana, which trains Self-Help Group (SHG) members to operate agricultural drones. These women will use drones for precise spraying of fertilizers and pesticides, promoting precision agriculture and creating new livelihood opportunities. The scheme's drone technology operations are guided by crop-specific Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), providing scientific, uniform, and safe guidelines to ensure consistency across the country.

Together, these platforms represent a digital push towards mechanization and modernization in Indian agriculture, aiming to support small and marginal farmers with fair access to subsidies and advanced farming technology. The Ministry is actively promoting these platforms to improve agricultural subsidy distribution and drone-based mechanization practices with an emphasis on transparency, efficiency, and rural women’s empowerment.

The initiatives were formally launched and reviewed during a national workshop held in New Delhi in mid-2025, indicating ongoing governmental commitment to digital reforms in agriculture.

Additional Developments

The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare also hosted a national workshop in New Delhi on 8 July 2025 to showcase the upgraded Centralized Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Platform Version 2.0 and the newly launched NaMo Drone Didi Yojana. The event featured live demonstrations of the portals and interactive sessions where state nodal officers shared feedback, implementation strategies, and best practices to improve the system.

In another development, WaveX, a startup accelerator under the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, launched "Kalaa Setu," inviting India's leading AI startups to develop scalable, indigenous solutions for automated generation of multimedia content-video, graphics, and audio-from text inputs in multiple Indian languages.

These advancements underscore the government's commitment to improving communication from government bodies to citizens in their own languages for faster, clearer, and more inclusive outreach. The initiatives also highlight the government's focus on fostering innovation and empowering rural women in India.

The government's focus on fostering innovation in India extends beyond agriculture, with initiatives like the "Kalaa Setu" project by WaveX.
"Kalaa Setu" aims to harness AI startups for the automated creation of multimedia content in various Indian languages.
This project underscores the government's commitment to improving communication from government bodies to citizens in their own languages.
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