Let us get introduced with some facts about agriculture in India:
1) 1.5% is the contribution for India to total food products exported all over the world.
2) India is 2nd largest crop producer country.
3) India’s gross agriculture turnover is Rs. 7.6 Laks Crore and GDP count is 14.2%
4) An average farmer in India travels 12 km to reach the market.
5) The amount of venture capital and private equity capital invested in agricultural ventures tripled to Rs 2,000 crore from last year i.e. 2012
6) Rice and milk accounts for Rs. 80 billion economic value as of 2009
Here are some hand-picked 5 Indian startups that shall change the course of Indian Agri business and production:
1) FarmsNFarmers.org
– Shashank Kumar (IIT-Del) & Manish Kumar (IIT-Kan)
The main aim was to provide end-to-end solution to farmers. Shashank teamed up with Manish 3 years ago with the same motive as today – evaluating farmer’s soild and climatic condition to prrosper high quality crops. This will result in improvement of land profitability and hence an increase in revenue generation for them. With their rigourous effor towars improvement of agris ector in India, they recently won 2013 Jain-INCID Award
2) Barrix.in
– Mayil Maganan & Lokesh Makam
Mr. Mayil introduced a whole new level of farming by replacing pesticides with pheromone based pest control traps. These are cheap, organic and harmless and will save the fruits and crops from insects. He teamed up with Lokesh and started Barrix 2 years ago and profitted themselves with 23 Lakhs at the very beginning of the venture and are planning to cross 10 crore in 2014.
3) FrontalRain.com
– Jayaram Srinivasan, Sreeram P and Ravi Mandayam
The owners quit SAP and thought of developing a software that helps plug gaps in the rural supply chain. This cloud computing based organisation plans had crossed 5 crore from Omnivore Capital and are already in leading news all over the country. Taking technology to remote places of India is a tedious task which guys at FrontalRain are doing with ease benefiting the overall crop production. SCM, Web based system, Factory Automation integration are very few examples of their policy, have a look at their website for more details.
Mr. Kannan initiated this project with an aim to optimize and reduce the workload of machine maintenance that farmers have today. MMW targets small scale cotton industry who have big machines to spun cotton. MMW introduces micro machine which will coniderably reduce labour cost, maintenance and scale cost and increases overall profit in cash crops.
5) Others in the list:
> Ashmeet Kapoor is continously working hard to set up an efficient distribution chain in Uttar Pradesh n India. His venture I Say Organic enabled farmers to earn more than before by selling their crops to him.
> Ravi Kukke set up his own farm in Tamil Nadu 4 years ago. He was a education solution partner in Microsoft and decided to grow something good in India. There were many farmers in his area that were looking for technical help. He poured in 15 Lakhs to start his farming land and today has already redeemed his net input.
> V.I. Bishor and Faisal back in 2009 started UBIO.in to enhance the agriculture in fields of medical, veterinary and diagnostics. They leverage the latest and best technologies from the fields of electronics, information technology, and biotechnology to create products and solutions that take hi-tech diagnostics to the mass-market
