New Delhi [India], December 29: Bihar’s agricultural economy supports nearly 20 million farmers, spread across 38 districts and 47,943 villages. Managing this scale with traditional, paper-driven systems was not just inefficient; it was unsustainable. Offline data collection, fragmented records, limited market visibility, weak monitoring and evaluation, and delayed policy feedback were slowing down progress and diluting impact. BIHAN was conceived to break this cycle.
Today, BIHAN stands as one of India’s most comprehensive examples of how data-driven governance can reshape agriculture, not incrementally, but structurally.
The Challenge: Scale Without Systems
Before BIHAN, the Agriculture Department in Bihar faced multiple systemic constraints:
- Manual and offline data collection across 10+ divisions
- Difficulty integrating data from multiple departments and external agencies
- Limited visibility into market prices and post-harvest infrastructure
- Ineffective monitoring of 30+ schemes due to a lack of real-time insights
- Inadequate tracking of agricultural assets, leading to wastage and leakages
Most critically, extension workers, responsible for last-mile farmer engagement, were expected to serve millions without digital tools that matched the scale of their mandate.
The government needed more than digitization. It required a single, intelligent platform capable of synchronizing people, processes, and policies.
BIHAN: From Data Collection to Decision Intelligence
BIHAN was designed as an end-to-end agricultural governance platform that connects field-level data to state-level decision-making in real time.
At its core, BIHAN streamlines:
- Data collection
- Monitoring and evaluation
- Resource management
- Policy planning
- Inter-departmental coordination
The platform delivers innovative visualization of synchronized data from all 47,943 villages, enabling officials to move from fragmented reports to unified insights.
Today, BIHAN supports:
- 9,100+ registered users
- 15+ distinct user roles
- 30+ customized functional modules
- 100+ dashboards and analytical reports
This isn’t reporting for compliance, it’s intelligence for action.
Integration at Unprecedented Scale
One of BIHAN’s defining strengths is its ability to ingest, validate, and aggregate data at scale.
BIHAN integrates 70+ external datasets, including:
- DBT farmer databases and subsidy schemes
- Soil Health Card data
- State Seed Corporation and Seed Certification Agency records
- PMKSY and irrigation data
- Farm mechanization systems
- Agricultural university datasets
- Planning department and social data sources
These robust data pipelines ensure continuous integration and validation, transforming raw inputs into actionable insights.
The result: a living agricultural data ecosystem that updates continuously, rather than retrospectively.
From Monitoring to Measurable Impact
BIHAN’s impact is visible not just in dashboards, but on the ground.
Between 2020 and 2024, BIHAN enabled:
- 5.01 million farmers to apply digitally for seed schemes
- Monitoring and governance of 30+ agricultural schemes
- Digital management of 22,298 agricultural assets, each geo-tagged with precise coordinates
- 910+ structured training programs for farmers and officers
In the Hari Chadar Seed Scheme alone, BIHAN eliminated 5% of non-compliant applicants, ensuring that subsidies reached only eligible farmers, delivering measurable savings and stronger governance.
Precision Policy, Not Blanket Interventions
BIHAN has fundamentally changed how policies are designed and deployed.
Examples include:
- Targeted drought compensation, reaching only farmers in affected geographies
- Optimal fertilizer allocation, guided by real-time crop and acreage data
- Discovery of 261 varieties of paddy and cultivation of strawberries across 18 districts, offering new insights into crop diversity and diversification opportunities
By aligning policy decisions with verified, real-time field data, BIHAN reduces wastage, improves outcomes, and strengthens farmer trust.
Built for the Field, Trusted by the System
BIHAN’s success also lies in its operational resilience.
Key enablers include:
- Role-based access control for secure, hierarchical usage
- Offline data collection capabilities for low-connectivity regions
- Automated workflows to reduce manual intervention
- CERT-IN certification, ensuring data security and compliance
- Migration from Azure Cloud to a secure on-premises State Data Center
These “plumbing” elements ensure BIHAN works seamlessly, at scale, under pressure, and in real-world conditions.
A Platform That Scales Beyond Departments
BIHAN is not confined to a single department. Its data is actively used by state and national systems, including cooperative and allied departments, enabling cross-functional alignment.
With 10+ formal data-sharing mechanisms, BIHAN acts as a digital public asset, supporting collaboration rather than duplication.
This interoperability makes BIHAN future-ready, extensible, and replicable.
Beyond Technology: A Shift in Governance Mindset
What BIHAN has ultimately delivered is not just digitization, but confidence.
Confidence that:
- Policies are backed by evidence, not estimates
- Resources are allocated where they are needed most
- Farmers are visible, counted, and served
- Systems can respond in days, not months
Even during unprecedented disruptions like COVID-19, BIHAN’s development and adoption remained uninterrupted, demonstrating institutional readiness and execution discipline.
The Bigger Picture
BIHAN proves that agricultural transformation does not begin with schemes; it begins with systems. When data flows seamlessly from the field to the secretariat, governance becomes proactive, inclusive, and accountable.
For Bihar’s 20 million farmers, BIHAN is not an app or a dashboard.
It is the invisible infrastructure enabling better policies, fairer distribution, and smarter decisions.
BIHAN is not just transforming agriculture in Bihar.
It is redefining how agricultural governance can work, at the population scale, with precision and with purpose.
About the Author
Venkat Lakshminarasimha – Executive Director, Solutions – India & Middle East at Dexian India
Venkat Lakshminarasimha, Head of Solutions for India and the Middle East at Dexian India, is a distinguished leader in business and product management. His expertise in digital transformation spans IT enterprises, government bodies, and the AgriTech sectors. Venkat is adept at converting complex client needs into innovative, actionable solutions through a consultative approach. His close collaboration with clients on software development, product launches, and lifecycle management ensures smooth transitions and long-term success.
Under Venkat’s leadership, Dexian’s Managed Services have expanded globally, with him overseeing hundreds of engineers across the US, the Middle East, and India in pioneering digital transformation and cognitive projects. He has been instrumental in establishing Centers of Excellence in data science, AI/ML, and AR/VR, showcasing his dedication to advancing engineering talent and fostering innovation. Venkat’s visionary leadership continues to drive excellence and growth in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own and do not reflect the publication’s views.
