Agri-tech start-up Dvara E-Registry has created a digital platform — Doordrishti — that enables farmers to source inputs from seeds and fertilisers companies and access credit and insurance from financial institutions, seek crop advisory, besides providing market linkages for them to sell their produce through the farmer producer organisations (FPOs).

“It’s a comprehensive digital platform for the farm sector that uses technology, information and analytics to connect farmers to different service providers,” said Founder and MD, Sanjay Mansabdar, Dvara E-Registry.

For banks and financial institutions, besides providing the reach to small and medium farmers, the digital platform helps them to assess their credit risk profile. Khetscore, a digital stack and part of Doordrishti platform, helps FI’s remotely assess the credit risk profile of the farmers using satellite images of their land parcels and analytics to decide whether to lend or not. Similarly for FPOs, the platform helps them digitise and plan their operations, while helping the service providers extend their reach to farmers, he said.

Response from farmers

“The response has been good for the Doordrishti platform through which we have already connected some 25,000 farmers and 40 FPOs across nine States including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha among others,” Mansabdar said. “We aim to connect about 80-100 FPOs by the year-end,” he added. Dvara E-Registry also helps formation of FPOs and has so far created 15 FPOs in these states by organising the farmers. Funded by the Dvara Trust (formerly IFMR Trust), the Hyderabad-based Dvara E-Registry is in the process of raising pre-series A funding from venture capitalists. The company is also carrying out small scale pilots of the image and remote sensing based insurance solution for a field crop with private insurers, Mansabdar said. “Using Khetscore model has helped us reduce the time to process loan applications by half and disburse the loans faster,” said Prasanta Sahu, COO of Odisha-based Vector Finance. “We now take two days to process a loan application of farmer as compared to four earlier,” Sahu said. Vector Finance has about half of its ₹150 crore loan exposure towards the farm sector, mainly for small and medium farmers in Odisha.

Khetscore enables us to underwrite in a much better way and helps in quick decision making of whether to lend or not, said LVLN Murthy, Deputy CEO, Dvara Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services. Khetscore helps the lending institutions to go back into the history for past three years and check what the farmer has grown and also keep a track on his crop cycle.

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