Facial recognition for cows: how the search for tech unicorns is revolutionising India’s farms

• Hundreds of start-up tech firms are offering everything from wearable health monitors for livestock to real-time agriscience data
• The boom has excited investors and raised hopes of solutions to the industry’s more intractable problems – if the government is willing to help

In India, agriculture remains a pillar of the economy, contributing about 18 per cent of GDP and employing more than half of the population. Yet the industry is highly fragmented, with outdated infrastructure and poor logistics contributing to an estimated US$13.1 billion post-harvest loss each year, according to Indian environment and science magazine Down to Earth.
But India’s booming agritech industry hopes to change all that, and has some novel ideas – wearable tech for livestock and facial recognition systems for cows among them – to do so.
Amid a wave of suicides by heavily indebted farmers and mass protests demanding better crop prices, drought relief and loan waivers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to increase farmers’ incomes and in 2018, launched the ‘DigiGaon’ or Digital Village programme, which aims to connect more than 100,000 villages to the internet so that residents can access services such as banking, health care and education online.
The prospect of greater rural connectivity appears to have inspired India’s private sector, and agricultural technology start-ups are now booming – in August, there were at least 450 nationwide, according to industry body the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), with that figure expected to increase by 25 per cent annually.
CropIn, a nine-year-old start-up based in Bangalore that has been backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is indicative of the trend. After somewhat troubled beginnings, it has grown 300 per cent in the past 15 months on the back of providing farmers with real-time agriscience data that they can access using their smartphones.
The company uses “field officers” to collect an array of information – ranging from weather patterns to land records and crop yields – which is then collated and presented on a single connected platform that adds value “for each stakeholder, be it farmers, banks, insurance firms, commodity traders, government and development agencies, farming companies, or the end customer,” said start-up co-founder Kunal Gupta.
“We’ve so far digitised 5.5 million acres of farmland and are expanding our operations overseas as well,” he said.
Money has been flowing into the sector from foreign investment funds such as the US-based Tiger Global and Germany’s Bertelsmann, with US$248 million invested in various Indian agritech initiatives in the first six months of 2019 – a 300 per cent increase on the whole of 2018.
And there certainly isn’t a lack of problems that need to be tackled either – Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president and chief strategy officer at Nasscom, identified bottlenecks in the country’s supply chain system, soil-data management and technology-driven initiatives as three areas where start-ups can bring a range of benefits.
“For the start-ups, choosing the right marketing strategy and specialising in a particular segment to scale it across the country will be crucial given that India is a diverse agriculture market with a variety of needs,” she said, adding that companies will also need policy support from the government to thrive.