According to agritech venture capital firm Omnivore’s latest report “The Future of Indian Agriculture and Food Systems: Vision 2030”, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the Indian farm sector’s digitisation as well as the adoption of digital rural products and payments over the last few months.
In its report, the venture capital firm underlined some key trends that would drive the future of agriculture in the country, including eco-friendly crops, precision agriculture, farmer-consumer intimacy, growing diversity, better quality and sustainability of food sources, among other things.
Jinesh Shah, Omnivore’s MD, said India’s agritech sector is seeing a paradigm shift catalysed by both digitisation and rural smartphone penetration. In the last 3-4 years there’s been a lot of interest in agritech, from corporates, private equity firms to other investors.
Agriculture is going digital, with farmers, dealers and distributors increasingly using tech-enabled payment systems.
The reduction of intermediaries owing to COVID-19-induced lockdown restrictions has also boosted the farm-to-fork model.
The report highlights the need for investment in several sectors like dairy, horticulture, poultry and aquaculture. The publication also predicts a future with remarkable advances in farm mechanisation.
India’s agricultural workforce in the future will be younger and more gender diverse and will move towards higher productivity jobs. The rural economy will become actively digitised, triggering a mass entrepreneurship movement around agricultural technologies, the report added.
With ‘Kirana stores’ getting digital, the report bets on ‘Khet to Kirana’ on the back of growing demand for traceability and transparency in the food supply chains.
More than 90% of Kirana stores across India will be digitized by the year 2025, as per the report’s findings.
There would be greater digitisation and the adoption of digital rural products will be rampant as well. In addition, there will be more maturity in tech solutions in the next decade, said Subhadeep Sanyal, partner, Omnivore.