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In an attempt to lure the tech community into working on issues associated with agriculture, the Centre on Friday launched a dozen challenges that would require technology solutions.
The government, which has been striving to double farmers’ income, has identified 12 innovative challenges resolving which can take farming in this country to the next level, said Agriculture Secretary SK Pattanayak, while announcing the challenges at the on-going TiEcon Delhi 2017 event.
Two sides to challengeThe challenges that have been thrown to individuals, entrepreneurs and tech start-ups include better and simpler soil testing techniques, tools for assaying and grading of agri-produce and algorithms that can help forecast crop yield and prices much in advance.
According to Pattanayak, the challenge has two parts: one for developing fundamental concepts and the other for testing products and processes in real-life situations. The Ministry will work closely with the winners of the Agriculture Grand Challenge, providing them all the assistance they need. The plan is to identify one idea stage start-up and one enterprise stage start-up for each of the 12 themes, he said. The chosen idea stage start-ups would get three months of incubation support, mentoring by domain experts from agriculture and assistance for real-time testing of the proof of concept.
The winners at the enterprise stage, on the other hand, will get access to a real-time agriculture market and market intelligence. They will also be provided with supervision and hand-holding by domain experts.
Huge scopeAshok Dalwai, CEO of the National Rainfed Area Authority, said there was a lot of scope for technology intervention in Indian agriculture.
Tech start-ups, Dalwai said, can help solve problems of all stakeholders — farmers getting better market access for their produce, consumers getting safer and healthier food and meeting sustainability goals, such as reducing the use of natural resources and inputs that affect the environment. India is currently producing 1.2 billion tonnes of different agricultural commodities and soon this would rise to 2 billion tonnes, Dalwai said.
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