Agri Fintech use-cases that empower Small & Marginal Farmers
An automated Agri “Data Exchange”, Agri Data Interoperability, and an Open, farmer-centric, national Platform will accelerate sectoral transformation:
A concept note.
Currently, agriculture utilises approximately 50% of India’s workforce, 90% of freshwater and 46% of land resources. However, despite the significant resources employed, the industry is barely able to generate 14% of our GDP. Given the long-term neglect of agronomics, the only way to make progress is to “pole-vault” over deficiencies by injecting appropriate technologies and innovation on a massively parallel scale, and adopting holistic, transformative, “platform” thinking.
There is a visible need for an open, scalable, integrating farmer-centric platform, that democratises access to Agri information, credit, insurance and markets; incubates innovative business models; and enables better decision making.
The “Indian Agricultural Platform” (IAP) created by the Agri & Tech eco-system, and regulated by a national public entity, is envisioned as an “enabling framework of Data and Services (applications) around a data exchange”.
It will have to reduce duplication by integrating data sources and a vast backend of new and existing applications: Govt’s eNam, ITC’s eChoupal, NCDEX’s NeML, APEDA’s TraceNet etc related to logistics, weather, supply-chain, warehousing, assaying, recommendation engines, etc.
Such a platform will be built around Agri use cases – one at a time, while encouraging application and data interoperability using well defined interfaces (APIs).
The Agri Collaboratory 