New Delhi, April 1 -- High demand for fertilisers during the upcoming sowing season, and tight supplies due to the escalating West Asian conflict, have prompted the agriculture ministry to use its Agristack platform, a digital hub of over 90 million farmers and their land parcels, to rationalise the sale of subsidised fertilisers, officials aware of the matter said. At an inter-ministerial briefing on Monday, Aparna S Sharma, additional secretary in the fertiliser ministry, said stocks are currently adequate but supplies had been hit, driving prices. The country's inventory stands at 18 million tonnes, higher than 14 million tonnes at this time last year, but total demand for the upcoming summer season is projected to be 39 million tonnes, she said. Agristack, where states have integrated their own repositories, has approximately 92.4 million digital farmers' IDs. With such a large database, it will be useful to "accurately estimate demand and direct crop nutrients efficiently to farmers by mapping requirements and sowing patterns", one of the officials cited above said. The goal is to prevent misuse, overuse or diversion of subsidized agro-chemicals toward illegal non-farm industrial use, according to the official. Growers not on Agristack will get fertilisers as usual but there will be stricter checks to verify purchases through point of sale devices, he said. Agristack and the government's public financial management system, the engine behind cash transfers to farmers under the PM Kisan programme, will be leveraged to ensure "verifiable" last-mile delivery, the official added. On March 25, Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh, in a review with department officials, asked officials to speed up work on expanding farmers IDs to make the "fertiliser distribution system transparent". India relies on imports to meet domestic demand for fertilisers, critical for its food security. The war in West Asia has choked off flows of crude oil, fertilisers and liquefied natural gas, sparking crises worldwide. The fertiliser ministry is reviewing data from a recent pilot across four states, where farmers purchasing fertilizers were validated with their Aadhaar and farmer IDs for authentication and generation of data of fertiliser use, according to a second official. Agristack includes a crop-sown registery, which allows officials to know what is sown where. "These details are being triangulated," a technical expert hired by the ministry said. Piecing together land and crop data with a "digitally verifiable credential" allows the government to make better fertiliser-demand estimates, as optimal per-hectare quantities required by key crops is known, the expert said. India has diversified its fertiliser sources to include Russia, Morocco, Australia, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and Canada but prices have increased, additional secretary Sharma said at the briefing.A statement last week by the Fertiliser Association of India, an industry body, said companies are "working closely with the Government of India, state governments and other stakeholders to ensure smooth distribution of fertilisers across regions"....