Relevance: GS-3: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life. Technology missions in Agriculture sector.

Key Phrases: Indian agritech, Farm mechanization, PPPs, agricultural technology and precision tools, data ecosystem, E-Sahamathi, Share field resources and infrastructure, research institutions, Convergence of programmes, World Economic Forum, AI4AI, Food Innovation Hubs.

Why in News?

• Fostering public-private partnerships is vital to create a viable ecosystem for farm technology.

Overview of Agritech in India

• The overall agritech ecosystem witnessed a revenue growth of approximately 85 percent during FY 2019-20. An Ernst & Young 2020 study pegs the Indian agritech market potential at US$24 billion by 2025, of which only one percent has been captured so far.
• Meanwhile, another Bain & Company report, jointly produced with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in March 2022, indicates that private equity investors have focused on systemic issues in the agritech industry and its sustainable development. Private equity investments in agritech start-ups between 2017 and 2020 amounted to INR 66 billion, growing at the rate of over 50 percent. Supporting this has been the growth of the rural microfinance sector – from INR 1.22 trillion in December 2019 to INR 1.46 trillion in March 2021. Agri credit grew from INR 8 trillion in FY 2014-15 to INR 14 trillion in FY 2019-20.
• The report notes that a surge of agritech start-ups have entered the ecosystem to offer technology-based solutions like off take marketplaces, storage and transportation services, and agronomy advisory services while large traditional players seek to reduce operational costs and manage scale via in-house solutions and new partnerships with emerging players. Global technology giants, like IBM and Microsoft, are looking at innovative solutions for crop health monitoring and yield estimates, for example.
• With ever increasing internet penetration in the country, and rural regions being the primary driver of this growth, India stands well equipped to adapt to changing methodologies in agriculture and transition from conventional business models to various innovative business models propelled by agritech.

Why Utilization of Agri-Tech is Important for India?

• The government’s proposal to deliver hi-tech services to farmers through public private partnerships (PPPs), recently presented in its annual budget, is likely to offer critical support for the agricultural sector at a time when it is greatly needed.
• The Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine has massively disrupted the global food system, putting huge pressure on agriculture-focussed countries like India to provide more sustainable options.
• This is where agricultural technology could prove vital. India has potential economic value of $50-65 billion through digital agriculture by 2025 translating to 23 per cent addition to the current value of agricultural produce, according to a report by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and McKinsey & Company.
• Such investment can also have a significant impact beyond the economy. With 60 per cent of India’s agricultural land being rain-fed, climate change poses a critical threat to food and agricultural systems.
• So using agricultural technology and precision tools will be more important than ever to prevent hunger and eliminate food waste, and making these technologies more accessible to India's 130 million smallholder farmers can ensure greater financial resilience for them.
• As new technologies present a major opportunity to transform agricultural systems, every stakeholder must play a role in realising this potential. This is where public private partnerships (PPPs) will be vital.

Four pillars

• Fundamentally, there are four pillars needed for successful public private partnerships in agriculture and how they are already being applied in India:
• Open up the data ecosystem. Why it's important: Through an extended discussion with 35-plus leading agricultural technology start-ups and some of the largest industry players, opening up critical datasets are the most important factor for unlocking the $65 billion digital agriculture economy. Farm level digital advisory services can enhance productivity by 15 per cent, but they need datasets of soil health, weather and farm sensors.

• Share field resources and infrastructure: India has 650 plus start-ups that offer agri-tech innovations in partnership with industries and financial institutions, but lack scale due to the very high costs of serving smallholding farmers and building their own distribution system.
• National and state governments have multiple institutions providing extension services to farmers like the CSC portal, a pan-India network of common service centres for extending e-gov and business services to rural areas through a single delivery platform;
• Partnering with academic and research institutions: While start-ups have good expertise of emerging technologies however they often lack the application-level domain expertise. Such digital innovations also need testing and validation for credibility among farmers and scaled field deployment. The existing body of agricultural research from universities and institutions can be better leveraged to scale work done by private agricultural technology players through PPPs.
• Praveen Rao, Vice-Chancellor at Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University, says: “We support more than 20 start-ups across AI, drones, IoT sensors etc through our Agri-Hub sandbox and our mission is to build a vibrant entrepreneurship culture among all the innovators, rural entrepreneurs and especially youth, women and farmers.”
• Convergence of programmes and policies for agricultural technology services: Government can help build a standardised platform for direct support and incentives to farmers and FPOs, which could specifically be leveraged for agricultural technology services.
• Jinesh Shah, Managing Partner at Omnivore, a leading venture capital organization focused on agriculture, says: “Public private partnership for digital services in agriculture is an urgent requirement to help scale the agri start-up ecosystem and enable innovation to reach smallholding farmers."

• Other States including Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya and Karnataka have also been exploring various PPP approaches for hi-tech agriculture services. Madhya Pradesh has launched a Food Innovation Hub to explore PPP models for crop value chain transformation, while Meghalaya has been examining how to leverage technologies to transform the turmeric value chain.

Way forward:

• To realise the opportunity of emerging technologies for agriculture and food systems much change is needed. For instance, it will be critical to develop a flexible framework/handbook for defining a PPP approach through multi-stakeholder consultations, which can then be adopted by States to meet specific priorities.
• Since the Budget announcement of hi-tech services for farmers through a PPP approach, there is a need of launching this initiative in mission mode. National and State governments can strengthen the dialogue with private stakeholder ecosystem and establish the PPP framework through consultations and evidence-based learning through pilots.
• Overall, it is an excellent opportunity to revisit policy level support for innovation and for changing the landscape of agriculture.

Source: Press-Reader

Mains Question:

Q. “The Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine has massively disrupted the global food system, putting huge pressure on agriculture-focussed countries like India to provide more sustainable options”. Critically analyse.