The Hindu BusinessLine•
Technology as an enabler: Reimagining Indian agritech
India has produced hundreds of agritech startups over the past decade, attracted more than two billion dollars in venture capital, and still cannot point to a definitive pure-play agritech unicorn in the field. That gap between investor enthusiasm and commercial outcomes is not a failure of technology. Rather, it reflects a deeper reality: technology investments have frequently overlooked the most critical bottlenecks in the agricultural value chain.
The paradox is particularly striking in a country where agriculture and allied sector supports 46.1 per cent of the population and contributes around 16 per cent to the GDP.
The rise of agritech in India followed a familiar and logical trajectory. In the early years, roughly 2012 to 2017, efforts focused on advisory services, weather data and market information delivered through mobile platforms. As the ecosystem matured, investors moved into a more ambitious phase, backing platforms that sought to connect farmers directly with inputs, procurement, logistics and financial services. Several sizable businesses emerged on the premise that a digital layer could unlock significant value by connecting India’s fragmented agricultural ecosystem.
However, farmer adoption never kept pace with the capital invested. The challenge became more visible when technology required farmers to pay upfront, change established habits or trust algorithmic recommendations over years of field experience.
A smallholder farmer operating on thin, unpredictable margins simply asked one question. If the monsoon fails or prices plummet, who bears the loss? Most agritech solutions, regardless of their technology or design or utility, have yet to convincingly answer that question.
This challenge is global, but India’s scale and fragmentation make it particularly acute. As startups attempt to scale nationally, localization costs increase significantly.
At the same time, trust in rural India continues to reside primarily with local input dealers, progressive farmers, FPOs, co-operatives and village networks. Therefore, a startup that appears digital at the product level can quickly become operationally intensive on the ground.
None of this means that technology has failed agriculture. Rather, it means that direct-to-farmer software, sold and adopted like consumer apps in cities, was never the most natural entry point.
From an investment perspective, the more durable opportunity lies in what can be called the agricultural middle stream – the critical layer between farm gate and the end user market. This includes differentiated procurement platforms with supply chain control, FPC/FPOs, innovations in grading and quality assessment, storage and logistics infrastructure, energy- efficient cold chains and post-harvest solutions.
This layer is far from being peripheral. Rather, it is the operational core that links farmers to buyers, credit, quality assurance, and price discovery systems. Technology embedded within these existing relationships tends to succeed more often than technology that attempts to create an entirely new relationship from scratch.
This distinction matters because it shifts what a farmer is truly asked to do. Instead of adopting a new digital tool and hoping for payback, the farmer continues selling produce or buying inputs through familiar channels. Technology makes those channels faster, more transparent, and more efficient.
Traceability systems, embedded credit scoring, digital quality assessment, warehouse intelligence, and market linkage platforms that operate through existing aggregators, digitised Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS), co-operatives or farmer organizations exemplify this approach. In such models, the technology does the heavy lifting of connecting local supply to broader markets, and farmers continue doing what they already do. Further, better grading, traceability and storage infrastructure tend to translate up directly and reliably in the price a farmer receives.
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