Israel to counter cyberthreats and to revolutionise Indian farm production
Boosting measures to counter cyberthreats and to “revolutionise” Indian farm production, Israel has proposed to access India’s “big data,” the Ministry of External Affairs said at the end of the bilateral discussions on Monday, when both sides concluded four agreements, a report in The Hindu by journalist Kallol Bhattacherjee claims.
Speaking to journalists about the ongoing visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Vijay Gokhale, Secretary in charge of economic relations in the MEA, said Israel proposed to track individual Indian farmers, even as both sides joined hands to use a similar data-driven method to fight cybercrimes.
“The idea of big data was brought into the discussion by the Israeli side in the context of emphasising how technology can now be used to agglomerate vast amounts of information and then bear on individual field and individual [Indian] farmer’s efforts, to improve the yield.
This was the idea that was discussed today, the specifics will be discussed with the Agriculture Ministry and we will plan that soon,” Mr. Gokhale said. Minister for Agriculture Radhamohan Singh participated in the delegation-level talks on agriculture collaboration using Indian population’s big database, he said.
The official refused to elaborate whether India had safeguards in place to share Aadhaar-based data with Israel, but indicated that the data under consideration would be of a magnitude to facilitate monitoring of “individual farmers’ and ‘water utilisation, cutting of crop, plantation, soil condition.”
