Agriculture serves as the backbone in India. Bringing innovation and applying emerging technologies is one of the crucial goals for agritech projects in India. In the past few years, the Government of India has started emphasising and commercialising agriculture in various innovative ways from using drones for mapping to investment in data collection.
In this article, we list down the top 5 agritech projects deployed by the government of India.
(The list is in alphabetical order)
1| Agri Udaan
Agri Udaan is a Food and Agribusiness Accelerator project for agritech startups which is organised by a-IDEA, Technology Business Incubator of NAARM, supported by Dept. of Science & Technology. It is run by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). This is basically a six-month programme where shortlisted agritech startups are guided in order to scale-up stage innovators, entrepreneurs, and startups in Food and Agribusiness sectors. The focused areas of this project are smart agriculture, Agri biotech, supply chain technology, animal husbandry, farm mechanisation, farm-fresh retail and other such.
2| CropIn
CropIn is a SaaS-based agritech startup which delivers future-ready farming solutions to the entire agricultural sector. Founded by Krishna Kumar in 2010, the startup utilises cutting-edge technologies like Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Language and Remote Sensing to enable its clients in order to analyse and interpret data to derive real-time actionable insights on standing crops. In June 2018, the Department of Agriculture, Karnataka joined hands with this startup to start a programme to helps the farmers adopt smart-farming techniques and an increase in the growth of crops. Besides Karnataka Government, the startup has also tied up with the Department of Horticulture (DOH) in Andhra Pradesh in the districts of Krishna and Chittoor.
3| Maha AgriTech Project
The Maha Agri Tech project was launched in January 2019 for the welfare of the farmers and is one of South India’s largest producers and marketers of bioproducts and seeds supplier. It aims at empowering Maharashtra farmers along with modernising the field of agriculture. The project includes Agritech bioproducts such as Maha Bullet, Maha Zyme, Maha Force, Maha M-Blast, Maha Shock, Maha Bloom Plus, etc. The aim of the scheme is to modernise agriculture and empower state farmers. Furthermore, the Maha Agritech programme is also launched to solve the agrarian problems with the help of satellites and drones.
4| SatSure
SatSure is an innovative large area analytics startup which leverages advances in satellites, machine learning and big data analytics to provide answers to large area questions across multiple domains like agriculture, forestry, insurance, irrigation, cities, environment and Oil & Gas. Not only the Government of Andhra Pradesh but also insurance companies and other large banks are leveraging the solutions of this startup. NITI Aayog supported the startup through initiatives like the Grand Agriculture Challenge. The platform enables combining of satellite imagery with the weather, IoT, social and economic datasets, among many others to generate timely, location-specific insights.
5| Thanos
Thanos is an agritech drone tech startup founded by Pradeep Palelli and Prathyush Akepati in 2016 which use drones to offer innovative solutions to conventional problems. It has been constructing drones as effective pesticide-spraying technology. The startup won the Drone Olympics Challenge held in Karnataka which was jointly organised by the Ministry of Defence and the Drone Federation of India. Currently, the startup is working to produce aerial pesticide drones to help the farmers in agriculture. It is supported and mentored by a Government of Telangana initiative known as Research and Innovation Circle of Hyderabad (RICH).
