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Startups and venture capital are pouring into what might seem an unlikely place: India’s vast, outdated agriculture industry.
Seizing on controversial new deregulation, entrepreneurs are selling farmers apps to connect them to big buyers nationwide and using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the rickety supply chains that lose one-fourth of India’s produce to wastage.
Enormous amounts of India’s grain, fruit and vegetables rot between farm and table because of manual handling, repeated loading and unloading, poor inventory management, lack of adequate storage and slow movement of goods. This rate of wastage from faulty supply chains is four to five times that of most large economies, experts say.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced changes it calls a watershed that will “remove middlemen and let farmers sell their produce directly to buyers,” improving their prospects, especially in far flung areas.
Modi's September overhauls, potentially the biggest reform ever to India's massive farm economy, let farmers sell to institutions and big retailers such as Walmart WMT.N, not just to regulated wholesale markets.
But farmers fought back with disruptive national protests and Modi lost a cabinet minister from breadbasket state Punjab over concerns that the deregulation might endanger government-guaranteed minimum prices for produce.
The farm sector contributes nearly 15% of the output of India’s $2.9 trillion economy and employs around half its 1.3 billion people. Find more...
Source: Online/SZK
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