The Government of Maharashtra today launched MahaAgX, a state-level agriculture data exchange platform, at AI4Agri 2026 — marking a major step toward building trusted public digital infrastructure for AI-driven agriculture.
MahaAgX has been designed and developed by the Centre of Data for Public Good (CDPG), Indian Institute Science, Bangalore, in partnership with the Department of Agriculture, Government of Maharashtra, and the World Bank. With this, Maharashtra becomes the second state in India to establish a dedicated agriculture-focused data exchange.
Built on a federated, standards-based architecture, MahaAgX enables:
- Secure, consent-driven data sharing
- Interoperable integration of multi-source datasets
- Scalable infrastructure to support public and private innovation
By empowering government departments to securely share critical datasets — while retaining control and ensuring privacy — the platform lays the foundation for responsible, large-scale AI adoption in agriculture.
Speaking about MahaAgx, Dr Inder Gopal, Chairman,CDPG and Research Professor, IISc, said, “AI in agriculture will only scale when it is built on trusted, high-quality, and interoperable data infrastructure. MahaAgX is not just a technology platform — it is a public digital backbone designed to enable secure data exchange, protect farmer interests through consent-driven frameworks, and unlock innovation across startups, researchers, and government agencies. If we want AI to truly serve farmers at scale, we must first build the rails that make responsible data sharing possible.”
At AI4Agri 2026, CDPG also hosted a deep-dive session on building agriculture data backbones at scale and showcased live demonstrations of the MahaAgX architecture, integration models, and real-world use cases.
The session brought together policymakers, government representatives, technologists, researchers, and industry leaders to deliberate on:
- The role of public digital infrastructure in agriculture
- Creating consent-based and privacy-preserving data ecosystems
- Institutional models for state-level data exchanges
- Enabling AI innovation while maintaining regulatory oversight
MahaAgX represents a collaborative public-sector effort to build the digital rails required for scalable, policy-aligned agricultural AI in India.
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