India’s next big economic opportunity:
Convergence of Agriculture & IT
RAJKUMAR DAS
India’s next big economic opportunity, after winning the world with information technology services, is agriculture, with a current economic value of US$600 billion estimated in 2020-21. Convergence of agriculture and IT is creating major opportunities to usher in smart-farming technologies and tools, to unlock new economic values for every wing of the agriculture eco-system (Agri Governance, Agri input and Agri output).
Technology enablement is solving critical age-old problems for the Indian agrarian economy, like production risk coverage, demand supply aggregation of small and marginal farmers, transparent governance, and adding values to the rural economy like market-linked production and addressing the critical challenge of underemployment. Millions of farm-technology jobs in the farm and allied sectors will get created for rural youth.
AgriGate, a conclave co-hosted by NASSCOM and InGreens, a Kolkata born AgTech startup and one of the fastest growing AgTech firm in India. It is the first such event in India, that’s bringing together all the players in the agriculture and related technology ecosystem, not only from across India, but also from six other countries, as well as most of the large Indian Venture Capital firms.
InGreens is happy to announce several tie-ups with global and Indian partners across AgTech R&D, and business.
· An expression of intent with IIT Kharagpur, has been agreed for R&D in satellite image processing, and ready-to-cook food.
· Fashol.com, of Bangladesh and InGreens have decided to work together for synergistic growth opportunities.
· GreentechAI of UK and InGreens are collaborating for farm data analytics.
· InGreens become industry partner with C-DAC to develop AI-based multimodal dialogue system for Indian farmers
Agriculture policymakers from several Indian states, CEOs from input providers (finance, technology, seeds, fertilizers, farm equipment) to supply chain, food, and retail sector, will be joining the event to connect, collaborate and co-create solutions, to accelerate the digital transformation of this industry, to build the future-of-farms-n-food.
It is interesting to note that agriculture has witnessed the least adoption of IT in the past, and thereby presents a huge scope for a technological leap forward. This is mission-critical if we are to improve farm productivity and efficiency in India, which is one of the world’s leading agriculture economies. With the world’s population expected to grow to 9.7 billion by 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates agriculture will need to produce almost 50 percent more food, livestock fodder, and biofuel than in 2012 to satisfy global demand.
Pointers of the sessions: Contribution of Agriculture & allied sector of Economy
Close collaboration of the farming ecosystem with academia and local governing bodies
We want to reduce the maximum cost for the farmers
Remote sensing ecosystem
2016 Sikkim is stated as the fully organic state for agriculture
Terrain of Sikkim needs good technological agriculture and farmers needs to be educated to know about recent technology of agriculture
We need to start from the grassroot level to be aware about recent technology of farming
When Pradhan mantri fasal bima yojna was implemented the standard problems will be solved
Technology needs to be timely implemented to execute the farming plan
Starting to solving the problem from the basic
Farmer insurance is very important
Technology play a very major role in agriculture
Increase the efficiency of agriculture by the technology by 20% to 30%
It’s take 3500 l of water to make 1 kg of rice in paddy culture
Using the technology in aquaculture 1.5kg of nutrients required in 1kg of prawns
Covid effected the technology but at that digital technology comes across which will help in the growth of the agriculture
There should be a balance between the digitalization and agriculture
People doing startup needs to understand the formation of the technology and how to run the farming
Adoption of agrigate in less than 10%
We need to grow and increase the percentage to spread the awareness about this technology of AgriGate
We invest for the sustainability in this technology and we connect with the farmers
