Employees of Syngenta examine corn with a moisture-meter device to check if the crop is ready for harvest, in a corn field in Krishna district in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, India, Apr 1, 2024. BENGALURU: Lokeswara Reddy, an Indian farmer with two decades of experience, has seen his crops flourish after lean years, thanks to earth-observation satellites.began to disrupt his earnings about 10 years ago, said Reddy, 52, currently a contract farmer with global giant Syngenta.
Reddy said that over the last decade he has increased his net profit to 20,000 rupees per acre on corn at his farm in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, up from 5,000 - 10,000 rupees. Reuters spoke to 11 experts and farmers, six startups in the industry and three NGOs who said space technology and big data were primed to help Indian agriculture reach new heights.
Cropin, founded in 2010 and backed by both Google and the Gates Foundation, recently signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to crunch satellite data to solve for global food insecurity. Baring Private Equity-backed SatSure, another Indian startup, crunches earth observation data to inform loan analysis. Chief Executive Officer Prateep Basu said there are about 70 million active farmer bank accounts in the country, representing roughly 38 per cent of the total pool. That makes up about $200 billion of all lenders' loan books, he said.
"Agriculture has never been a tech-forward sector and often farmers want to rely on traditional practices, or the wisdom of their forefathers," said Raghunath Reddy, a Syngenta manager.Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her 2023 budget speech, announced a 703 million rupee accelerator fund to boost agritech startups. In March 2023, the government said the fund was supporting 1,138 such companies.
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