In its white paper on ‘Gearing Up To Solve Food Security Challenges’, the Aayog said that the agritech solutions available in the market are making the lives of smallholders better by improving access to quality input, access to market, reducing risks, access to information, and a host of other products and services, resulting in improved productivity and price realisation.
“Still, the agritech start-ups are not scaling up as fast as the start-ups in other sectors as they face challenges regarding access to quality data, regulations and the absence of agriculture-related infrastructure,” it said.
The white paper has been prepared by the Atal Innovation Mission under NITI Aayog in partnership with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and supported by Rabo Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Aayog has proposed half-a-dozen recommendations to help agritech startups in India to achieve their full potential and ensure food security in the country.
These include improving last-mile connectivity, access to public data, promoting local level of infrastructure for farm-level processing, digitalisation of licensing regime, formulating state-specific AgriTech policy and establishment of facilitation centre for agritech start-ups at local as well as global level.
“A distinct agritech start-up policy will go a long way in promoting and facilitating many such start-ups. It will also help the government departments work around the issues related to sharing of data, usage of data, and privacy issues by the private firms,” it said, adding these challenges are primarily related to regulations, understanding the market and its size and local facilitation.Further, it has suggested setting up of a central body which will work with industry associations, respective embassies and multilateral organisations and promote start-ups to expand to other markets.
The Aayog is of the view that due to fragmented land parcels and many smallholder farmers in India, it is challenging for start-ups to reach out to individual farmers.
“To ensure that all smallholders can benefit from the services and products of the agritech startups, the government needs to put significant effort into building the capacity of local institutions like FPOs or cooperatives,” said, adding that these local institutions will act as a conduit between smallholders and start-ups.
Talking about the need for promoting local level of infrastructure, the Aayog said the government should promote the creation of local agriculture-related infrastructures by incentivising and providing financing from formal financial institutions. “It will boost the farmers’ income and ensure the start-ups’ scalability and sustainability,” it added.
India has more than 2,000 agritech startups and the government aims to scale to 10,000 in near future.