Overview
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered the plenary address at the India Today Group’s Kisan Tak Bharat Agriculture Conference on Thursday, November 12, highlighting a decade in which farm growth averaged above 4 percent and citing a World Bank finding that about 50 crore people have escaped poverty.
- He repeated government deployment figures to illustrate scale: roughly 12 lakh solar pumps under PM-KUSUM, about 8,400 soil‑testing labs in Gujarat, vaccination reach for livestock covering around 8 crore farmers, and a network of about 10,000 Farmer Producer Organisations.
- Modi urged a technology-led transformation of agriculture, calling on engineers, startups and equipment makers to build solar-powered farm machines, AI and sensor tools, and to expand use of drones for tasks such as spraying fertilizer and pesticides.
- He pressed for crop diversification, on‑farm value addition and better market access so farmers move from subsistence producers to agripreneurs, and he warned against heavy chemical use while promoting natural‑farming approaches.
- The speech mixed policy messaging with political critique and offered no major new national schemes at the event, leaving the immediate outcome focused on signalling priorities to industry, scientists and state governments.