What is the mKisan Portal?

The mKisan Portal, at mkisan.gov.in, is the SMS-based farmer advisory and outreach service of the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW), Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India. It lets authorised officers of the Central and State agriculture departments, Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), State Agricultural Universities (SAUs), ICAR institutes, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and cooperating agencies compose and send crop-, stage-, location- and language-specific SMS advisories, weather alerts, mandi prices and scheme messages to registered farmers on their basic or smart mobile phones. The portal also anchors an integrated stack — the Kisan Suvidha mobile app, the USSD service *51969#, the Kisan Call Centre 1800-180-1551 and an Interactive Voice Response System — that reaches farmers on whatever handset and connectivity they have.

When was mKisan launched and by whom?

The mKisan SMS Portal was launched on 16 July 2013 by the then Union Minister of Agriculture, Sharad Pawar, in New Delhi. It was conceived within the DA&FW as a farmer-outreach platform that would use the country's very high mobile-phone penetration to deliver personalised extension advice at low marginal cost — without requiring a smartphone or internet at the farmer's end. The Kisan Suvidha companion mobile app was launched later, on 19 March 2016, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Sehore, Madhya Pradesh, at the Krishi Unnati Mela — extending the same content stack to smart-phone users.

Which ministry, department and technical partners run mKisan?

mKisan is owned by the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW) within the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India, and is currently anchored by the Kisan Call Centre / Extension Division of DA&FW. Technical development and hosting are provided by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). Content flows in from the State Agriculture Departments, KVKs, ICAR institutes, State Agricultural Universities, the India Meteorological Department under the Ministry of Earth Sciences (for the GKMS agromet advisories), and market-price partners including the Directorate of Marketing and Inspection (DMI) that runs the Agmarknet portal.

What are the different channels of the mKisan stack?

There are five main channels — the mKisan SMS Portal on mkisan.gov.in for authorised officers to send targeted SMS to farmers; the Kisan Suvidha Android / iOS app for smart-phone users; the USSD service on *51969# for basic-phone users without SMS registration; the pan-India Kisan Call Centre at the toll-free 1800-180-1551 open 06:00–22:00 in the local language; and an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) for voice-based push advisories to registered farmers who prefer voice over text. All channels share the same registration and content back-end, so a farmer registered on any one of them can be reached on the others.

How many languages does mKisan support?

The mKisan SMS Portal supports over 12 Indian languages — including Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia and Assamese — with the farmer's preferred language captured at registration and used by the portal to route the SMS. The Kisan Call Centre routes calls to Farm Tele Advisors based on the caller's language preference so that farmers can speak in their mother tongue. The Kisan Suvidha app renders its interface and advisory content in the local language selected by the user.

How does mKisan integrate with the Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS)?

The India Meteorological Department's Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa is the largest single content stream on mKisan. IMD's Agromet Field Units (AMFUs) at ICAR institutes and SAUs and District Agromet Units (DAMUs) at KVKs prepare the twice-weekly (Tuesday and Friday) block-level agromet bulletin — weather forecast plus crop-, stage- and location-specific advice — and push it to registered farmers in the block through the mKisan pipeline. See our GKMS deep-dive for how the AMFU / DAMU network and the medium-range district forecast work together.

How does mKisan integrate with Agmarknet and mandi prices?

The Directorate of Marketing and Inspection (DMI) under DA&FW runs the Agmarknet portal, which aggregates daily arrivals and prices from Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) mandis across the country. Farmers registered on mKisan can opt in to receive daily or periodic SMS with prices of their selected crops from the nearest mandis. The Kisan Suvidha app surfaces the same Agmarknet feed for on-demand price lookups. See our Agmarknet deep-dive for the underlying commodity, market and grade coverage.

How does a farmer register on mKisan?

There are three simple routes. First, a farmer can visit mkisan.gov.in, click the farmer registration link and enter mobile number, state, district, block, preferred language and crops of interest — all subsequent SMS then arrive filtered to that profile. Second, a farmer can install the Kisan Suvidha app from Google Play or the Apple App Store and register within the app; the registration flows into the same mKisan back-end. Third, a farmer can call the Kisan Call Centre at 1800-180-1551 and the Farm Tele Advisor can enrol the farmer on-call. Farmers can also enrol through the State Agriculture Department extension officer or the KVK, which pushes the farmer's details into mKisan. There is no fee.

How does mKisan relate to the AgriStack Farmers Registry and the Digital Agriculture Mission?

mKisan predates the AgriStack by roughly a decade — it was launched in 2013 as a farmer-outreach layer built on mobile-phone registration; AgriStack, approved by the Union Cabinet on 2 September 2024 under the Digital Agriculture Mission, is a formal Farmers Registry that assigns each Indian farmer a unique Farmer ID linked to state land records. Once AgriStack is populated at scale, the mKisan advisory pipeline can move from opt-in mobile-number registration to a Farmer-ID-anchored, land-parcel-specific advisory — the same block-level advisory can then be refined to a plot-level advisory using the Crop Sown Registry and Krishi Decision Support System. See our Digital Agriculture Mission and Krishi-DSS pages for that longer-run direction.

What is the scale of mKisan today?

The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare has publicly cited a registered-farmer base in the several-crore range and cumulative SMS traffic in the thousands of crore since launch — headline figures that are periodically updated in Press Information Bureau releases, Standing Committee reports and the Ministry's annual report. Exact current registration, active-farmer and SMS-volume figures fluctuate with campaigns, procurement seasons and integration events (for example, PM-KISAN instalment releases produce large SMS spikes) and should be verified against the current annual report on agricoop.nic.in and mkisan.gov.in rather than treated as fixed.

What are the known limitations of mKisan?

SMS delivery quality varies with telecom coverage, particularly in the North-East and hill states. Text-literacy is a real constraint for a subset of farmers, which is why the Kisan Call Centre voice channel and IVRS are important complements. Advisory quality varies across states because content composition sits with state and district extension staff — where extension capacity is thin, the SMS traffic is thin too. Registration accuracy (correct crop, block and language against the farmer's actual farm) is only as good as the initial enrolment. And mKisan is inherently a broadcast / narrow-cast channel — for two-way scientific consultation, the Kisan Call Centre and KVK visits remain essential.

mKisan Portal — SMS-based farmer advisory of the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare

The mKisan Portal, at mkisan.gov.in, is the SMS-based farmer advisory and outreach service of the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW), Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India, launched by then Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar on 16 July 2013. It lets authorised officers of the Central and State agriculture departments, Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), State Agricultural Universities, ICAR institutes and the India Meteorological Department compose and send crop-, stage-, location- and language-specific SMS advisories, weather alerts, mandi prices and scheme messages to registered farmers — anchoring an integrated stack that also includes the Kisan Suvidha mobile app (launched 19 March 2016), the USSD service on *51969#, the Kisan Call Centre on toll-free 1800-180-1551 and an Interactive Voice Response System.

At a glance

Service name: mKisan Portal (mKisan SMS Portal for Farmers).
URL: mkisan.gov.in.
Launched: 16 July 2013 by then Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, New Delhi.
Nodal ministry: Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW), Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India.
Technical partner: National Informatics Centre (NIC).
Companion app: Kisan Suvidha (Android / iOS), launched 19 March 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Krishi Unnati Mela, Sehore, Madhya Pradesh.
USSD service: *51969# — menu-driven advisories on any basic mobile phone.
Kisan Call Centre: toll-free 1800-180-1551, open 06:00–22:00, all languages.
Languages: 12+ Indian languages including Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia and Assamese.
Charges: free of cost to farmers; Kisan Call Centre is toll-free.
Related deep-dives: GKMS · Agmarknet · PM-KISAN · PMFBY · KCC · Soil Health Card · Digital Agriculture Mission · Krishi-DSS.

Why mKisan matters

Indian agricultural extension has, for decades, run into two hard constraints — a scientist-to-farmer ratio that no field-visit model can bridge, and a country-scale linguistic and agro-climatic diversity that no one-size advisory can serve. mKisan was designed in 2013 to route around both, by using the country's very high mobile-phone penetration to deliver personalisedextension advice at low marginal cost — filtered to the farmer's crop, block and language, and composed by scientists and extension staff who never have to travel to the farmer's village. In the years since, mKisan has become the default push-notification layer for most Central-sector farmer schemes — PM-KISAN instalment alerts, PMFBY enrolment and claim windows, Kisan Credit Card reminders, Soil Health Card availability, mandi-price updates from Agmarknetand, most importantly, the twice-weekly block-level agromet bulletin from IMD's Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa.

The five channels of the mKisan stack

mKisan is best understood as a five-channel stack that shares a single farmer-registration and content back-end, so that a farmer registered on any one channel can be reached on the others:

mKisan SMS Portal (mkisan.gov.in). The core web portal. Registered officers of the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, State Agriculture Departments, ICAR institutes, State Agricultural Universities, Krishi Vigyan Kendras, IMD (GKMS), NAFED and other cooperating agencies compose and send farmer-facing SMS — including agromet advisories, crop-stage recommendations, pest and disease alerts, mandi price updates, procurement notifications and scheme messages — to targeted farmer lists filtered by crop, state, district, block and preferred language.
Who runs it: Owned and hosted by the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW); technical support from the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
Kisan Suvidha mobile app. Android and iOS app launched on 19 March 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Sehore, Madhya Pradesh, at the Krishi Unnati Mela. Delivers current weather, five-day district forecast, nearest mandi prices from Agmarknet, plant-protection advisories, dealer information for seed / fertiliser / pesticides, cold-storage and godown directories, soil-health advice, PMFBY / KCC information and access to the Kisan Call Centre — all in the local language.
Who runs it: DA&FW; built and maintained with NIC and IMD data feeds.
USSD Service — *51969#. A menu-driven USSD service that lets a farmer on any basic (non-smart) mobile phone dial *51969# to receive advisories, mandi prices and weather forecasts on the phone screen without needing SMS registration or internet. Multi-lingual by default.
Who runs it: DA&FW in partnership with the Department of Telecommunications and Indian mobile operators.
Kisan Call Centre (KCC) — 1800-180-1551. A pan-India toll-free helpline that farmers can call from any landline or mobile network between 06:00 and 22:00 to speak in their local language to a Farm Tele Advisor — an agricultural graduate or subject-matter specialist. Level-II queries are escalated to KVK / SAU / ICAR experts. A follow-up SMS with the advisory text is sent back to the caller via the mKisan platform.
Who runs it: DA&FW; operated through empanelled service providers with a network of call-centre nodes across major agro-climatic zones.
Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS). Voice-based outbound advisories in the local language pushed to registered farmers who prefer voice over SMS — particularly useful for farmers with low text-literacy. Delivered through the same mKisan back-end using the farmer's mobile number, crop, location and language preference.
Who runs it: DA&FW with mKisan and telecom partners.
Farmer web portal (services / registration). Farmers can self-register on mkisan.gov.in to select preferred crops, region and language, view historical SMS received, opt in and out of specific expert lists (state extension staff, KVK, ICAR institute, IMD GKMS) and access other DA&FW services. Officers use the same portal to compose and send messages.
Who runs it: DA&FW / NIC.

What kinds of SMS a farmer receives

Expert advisory SMS. Composed by state / KVK / SAU / ICAR / IMD officers and pushed to a targeted crop-and-block farmer list — sowing, irrigation, nutrient, plant-protection, harvest and post-harvest guidance.
Service SMS. PM-KISAN DBT alerts, PMFBY enrolment and claim windows, KCC renewal reminders, Soil Health Card availability and NAFED / state procurement notifications.
GKMS bulletin. IMD's twice-weekly (Tuesday / Friday) block-level agromet advisory delivered through the mKisan pipeline.
Mandi price SMS. Daily / periodic APMC mandi prices for the farmer's selected crops, drawn from the Agmarknet feed.
Weather warning SMS. IMD short-range severe-weather warnings — heatwave, cold wave, thunderstorm, hail, heavy rainfall — pushed to affected districts.

How to register — a farmer's quick guide

Visit mkisan.gov.in and open the farmer registration form. Enter mobile number, state, district, block, preferred language and crops of interest. All subsequent advisories will arrive filtered to that profile.
Install the Kisan Suvidha app from Google Play or the Apple App Store and register from within the app — the same profile flows into the mKisan back-end.
Dial the Kisan Call Centre at 1800-180-1551 from any phone (toll-free, 06:00–22:00) and the Farm Tele Advisor can enrol you on-call.
Dial *51969# from any basic mobile phone for a menu-driven USSD advisory and to opt in.
Contact your district KVK or the State Agriculture Department extension officer to be enrolled with the correct block and crop tags.

Convergence with the wider digital-agri stack

GKMS (Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa). IMD's twice-weekly block-level agromet bulletin is the largest single content stream on mKisan — the AMFU / DAMU network prepares the advisory; mKisan is the delivery pipe.
Agmarknet. The Directorate of Marketing and Inspection aggregates daily APMC mandi prices; mKisan pushes farmer-specific price SMS from that feed.
PM-KISAN. SMS alerts on each Direct Benefit Transfer instalment of ₹2,000 (three instalments a year), enrolment status, e-KYC reminders and grievance updates flow through mKisan and PFMS.
PMFBY. Crop-insurance enrolment window, premium-debit intimation and claim credit notifications reach farmers through mKisan SMS.
Kisan Credit Card and the Modified Interest Subvention Scheme. KCC renewal reminders and subvention communications are delivered through mKisan.
Soil Health Card. Soil-test availability and per-plot nutrient recommendations are pushed to registered farmers through the same pipeline.
Digital Agriculture Mission and Krishi-DSS. Once the AgriStack Farmers Registry and Crop Sown Registry are populated at scale, mKisan can move from opt-in mobile-number registration to Farmer-ID-anchored, plot-specific advisory using the Krishi Decision Support System.
State Agriculture Departments and ATMA. State extension staff and ATMA block-level functionaries are the largest cohort of advisory-composing officers on mKisan.

Design questions and limitations

Delivery quality. SMS deliverability varies with telecom coverage, particularly in the North-East and hill regions.
Text-literacy constraint. The Kisan Call Centre voice channel and IVRS are important complements for farmers who cannot read SMS reliably.
Advisory quality varies by state. Content composition sits with state and district extension staff and with anchoring KVK / AMFU / DAMU scientists.
Registration accuracy. Personalised advisories are only as good as the initial enrolment (crop, block, language). AgriStack Farmer-ID anchoring is the medium-run fix.
One-way channel. mKisan is primarily broadcast; two-way scientific consultation still needs the Kisan Call Centre and KVK visits.
Data governance. A national farmer mobile-number database with crop, location and language tags raises the same access, retention and inter-agency-sharing questions that AgriStack raises — the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 framework will shape the answers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the mKisan Portal?: The mKisan Portal, at mkisan.gov.in, is the SMS-based farmer advisory and outreach service of the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW), Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India. It lets authorised officers of the Central and State agriculture departments, Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), State Agricultural Universities (SAUs), ICAR institutes, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and cooperating agencies compose and send crop-, stage-, location- and language-specific SMS advisories, weather alerts, mandi prices and scheme messages to registered farmers on their basic or smart mobile phones. The portal also anchors an integrated stack — the Kisan Suvidha mobile app, the USSD service *51969#, the Kisan Call Centre 1800-180-1551 and an Interactive Voice Response System — that reaches farmers on whatever handset and connectivity they have.
When was mKisan launched and by whom?: The mKisan SMS Portal was launched on 16 July 2013 by the then Union Minister of Agriculture, Sharad Pawar, in New Delhi. It was conceived within the DA&FW as a farmer-outreach platform that would use the country's very high mobile-phone penetration to deliver personalised extension advice at low marginal cost — without requiring a smartphone or internet at the farmer's end. The Kisan Suvidha companion mobile app was launched later, on 19 March 2016, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Sehore, Madhya Pradesh, at the Krishi Unnati Mela — extending the same content stack to smart-phone users.
Which ministry, department and technical partners run mKisan?: mKisan is owned by the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW) within the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India, and is currently anchored by the Kisan Call Centre / Extension Division of DA&FW. Technical development and hosting are provided by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). Content flows in from the State Agriculture Departments, KVKs, ICAR institutes, State Agricultural Universities, the India Meteorological Department under the Ministry of Earth Sciences (for the GKMS agromet advisories), and market-price partners including the Directorate of Marketing and Inspection (DMI) that runs the Agmarknet portal.
What are the different channels of the mKisan stack?: There are five main channels — the mKisan SMS Portal on mkisan.gov.in for authorised officers to send targeted SMS to farmers; the Kisan Suvidha Android / iOS app for smart-phone users; the USSD service on *51969# for basic-phone users without SMS registration; the pan-India Kisan Call Centre at the toll-free 1800-180-1551 open 06:00–22:00 in the local language; and an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) for voice-based push advisories to registered farmers who prefer voice over text. All channels share the same registration and content back-end, so a farmer registered on any one of them can be reached on the others.
How many languages does mKisan support?: The mKisan SMS Portal supports over 12 Indian languages — including Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia and Assamese — with the farmer's preferred language captured at registration and used by the portal to route the SMS. The Kisan Call Centre routes calls to Farm Tele Advisors based on the caller's language preference so that farmers can speak in their mother tongue. The Kisan Suvidha app renders its interface and advisory content in the local language selected by the user.
How does mKisan integrate with the Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS)?: The India Meteorological Department's Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa is the largest single content stream on mKisan. IMD's Agromet Field Units (AMFUs) at ICAR institutes and SAUs and District Agromet Units (DAMUs) at KVKs prepare the twice-weekly (Tuesday and Friday) block-level agromet bulletin — weather forecast plus crop-, stage- and location-specific advice — and push it to registered farmers in the block through the mKisan pipeline. See our GKMS deep-dive for how the AMFU / DAMU network and the medium-range district forecast work together.
How does mKisan integrate with Agmarknet and mandi prices?: The Directorate of Marketing and Inspection (DMI) under DA&FW runs the Agmarknet portal, which aggregates daily arrivals and prices from Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) mandis across the country. Farmers registered on mKisan can opt in to receive daily or periodic SMS with prices of their selected crops from the nearest mandis. The Kisan Suvidha app surfaces the same Agmarknet feed for on-demand price lookups. See our Agmarknet deep-dive for the underlying commodity, market and grade coverage.
How does a farmer register on mKisan?: There are three simple routes. First, a farmer can visit mkisan.gov.in, click the farmer registration link and enter mobile number, state, district, block, preferred language and crops of interest — all subsequent SMS then arrive filtered to that profile. Second, a farmer can install the Kisan Suvidha app from Google Play or the Apple App Store and register within the app; the registration flows into the same mKisan back-end. Third, a farmer can call the Kisan Call Centre at 1800-180-1551 and the Farm Tele Advisor can enrol the farmer on-call. Farmers can also enrol through the State Agriculture Department extension officer or the KVK, which pushes the farmer's details into mKisan. There is no fee.
How does mKisan relate to the AgriStack Farmers Registry and the Digital Agriculture Mission?: mKisan predates the AgriStack by roughly a decade — it was launched in 2013 as a farmer-outreach layer built on mobile-phone registration; AgriStack, approved by the Union Cabinet on 2 September 2024 under the Digital Agriculture Mission, is a formal Farmers Registry that assigns each Indian farmer a unique Farmer ID linked to state land records. Once AgriStack is populated at scale, the mKisan advisory pipeline can move from opt-in mobile-number registration to a Farmer-ID-anchored, land-parcel-specific advisory — the same block-level advisory can then be refined to a plot-level advisory using the Crop Sown Registry and Krishi Decision Support System. See our Digital Agriculture Mission and Krishi-DSS pages for that longer-run direction.
What is the scale of mKisan today?: The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare has publicly cited a registered-farmer base in the several-crore range and cumulative SMS traffic in the thousands of crore since launch — headline figures that are periodically updated in Press Information Bureau releases, Standing Committee reports and the Ministry's annual report. Exact current registration, active-farmer and SMS-volume figures fluctuate with campaigns, procurement seasons and integration events (for example, PM-KISAN instalment releases produce large SMS spikes) and should be verified against the current annual report on agricoop.nic.in and mkisan.gov.in rather than treated as fixed.
What are the known limitations of mKisan?: SMS delivery quality varies with telecom coverage, particularly in the North-East and hill states. Text-literacy is a real constraint for a subset of farmers, which is why the Kisan Call Centre voice channel and IVRS are important complements. Advisory quality varies across states because content composition sits with state and district extension staff — where extension capacity is thin, the SMS traffic is thin too. Registration accuracy (correct crop, block and language against the farmer's actual farm) is only as good as the initial enrolment. And mKisan is inherently a broadcast / narrow-cast channel — for two-way scientific consultation, the Kisan Call Centre and KVK visits remain essential.

Official sources

mKisan Portal — mkisan.gov.in (Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare; farmer registration, officer login, SMS archives).
Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare — agricoop.nic.in (parent department; annual report; scheme guidelines).
Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare — agriwelfare.gov.in (parent ministry portal).
Kisan Call Centre — toll-free 1800-180-1551; open 06:00–22:00 in all major Indian languages.
Kisan Suvidha app — Google Play (Android; DA&FW / NIC).
Press Information Bureau — pib.gov.in (16 July 2013 launch release; 19 March 2016 Kisan Suvidha launch release; periodic scale updates).
India Meteorological Department — mausam.imd.gov.in and imdagrimet.gov.in (GKMS agromet bulletins delivered through mKisan).
Agmarknet — agmarknet.gov.in (Directorate of Marketing and Inspection; APMC price feed used by mKisan).
National Informatics Centre — nic.in (technology partner for mKisan and Kisan Suvidha).

The 16 July 2013 launch of the mKisan SMS Portal by then Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, the 19 March 2016 launch of the Kisan Suvidha app by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Sehore, the Kisan Call Centre toll-free number 1800-180-1551, the USSD code *51969# and the DA&FW / NIC operating role are drawn from Press Information Bureau releases and the mKisan Portal itself. Registered-farmer counts, cumulative SMS volumes and the state-wise composition of advisory content evolve with campaigns, procurement seasons and scheme events — farmers, KVK staff, State Agriculture Department officers and researchers should verify the current headline figures on mkisan.gov.in, agricoop.nic.in and the DA&FW annual report before quoting them.