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#AgriTech: Agriculture sector in India - Opportunities and Challenges
#AgriTech: Agriculture sector in India - Opportunities and Challenges

June 17, 2021

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Indian agriculture sector has the second largest agricultural land globally however, multiple challenges hold back its progress

Agriculture plays a huge role in shaping the national economy by contributing ~16% to India’s GDP with 44% of the total workforce employed in it. Though the overall sector is growing, the stress due to declining favourable inputs is on the rise. Despite India being an agrarian economy and a top producer and exporter of several agricultural commodities, multiple challenges such as high weather dependency, supply chain inefficiencies, depleting resources and low productivity hold back the sector from performing to its potential.

Agriculture opportunities
Agriculture sector in India: Opportunities & Challenges

Challenges faced by the Indian agricultural sector

While we have seen lot of growth potential and reality of making Indian agriculture future ready seems promising, there is still a long way to go to realise technology driven benefits. To be able to leverage technology in the Indian agriculture sector and realise measurable value add, it is critical to understand the challenges across the value chain and identify relevant technology interventions.

Here is a list of illustrative challenges faced by the agriculture sector in India across the value chain

Agriculture value chain challenges
Indian Agriculture sector’s value chain challenges

These challenges can be further compounded by the recent COVID-19 outbreak that has severely impacted availability of migrant labour interrupting harvesting activities, disrupting agriculture supply chains and creating a depression in demand of some of the food categories due to closures of hotels, restaurants, etc.

We can address many of the challenges that the sector faces currently can be addressed by efficient utilization of existing resources, using farm machinery (tractors, motorized equipment, etc.) and leveraging technology to capture and analyse real-time farm level data collection. Besides this, the macro data available with government bodies can enable predictive pest control, yield maximization and harvesting/sowing advisory.

AI has the potential to lead an agricultural revolution in the country, providing intelligent insights by uniquely combining data from mechanized farm equipment and IOT sensors with available macro data (weather, satellite, land use etc.).

In this series of blogs focused on AI in Agriculture let us try to answer the following questions:

  • Where should the Indian agricultural sector start their AI journey?
  • What are the government, provider and agriculture enterprise dynamics in the agriculture AI ecosystem?
  • How can agriculture enterprises move up the AI value curve?

Watch out my next article on how we can leverage AI in the agricultural space to overcome the challenges and expand the innovation horizon in the sector. Download our full report for more details: Leveraging AI to maximize India’s Agriculture output


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Research Lead, FutureSkills

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