India: Horticulture Farmers Lead the Way in Precision Tech Adoption
India is among the top three producers in the world for most major agricultural commodities, writes Sumit Chakraberty at Mint. That’s not surprising with half the country’s workforce involved in farming on 140 million hectares of agricultural land, nearly half of which is irrigated. At the same time, the vast majority of farmers in the country are poor and we see the spectre of thousands of suicides by them each year.
The biggest problem Indian farmers face is a disparity in information on demand, coupled with lack of market linkages.
“The injustice we have done to our farmers is not being able to ensure that their produce has a market where they can get better returns,” says Abhilash Sethi, principal at agritech venture capital (VC) firm Omnivore.
It’s estimated that farmers receive only 30% of the value of their produce, and that’s an average across all crops. The returns are usually lower in conventional commodities like rice, wheat, potato and onion.
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Foodgrains are where market linkages are the poorest as farmers are yoked to agricultural produce market committees (APMCs). All states, except Kerala, Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir, enacted the APMC Act to stipulate that agricultural staples should only be sold in mandis. This was supposed to prevent exploitation of farmers by traders and middlemen, but it got corrupted over time.
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