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Encouraged with the success of its pilot project, CropIn Technology Solutions is all set to digitise details of another 20,000 farmer beneficiaries in 200 drought and flood-prone villages of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar next year.
CropIn, a Bengaluru-based agtech startup had, in 2017, digitised 20,000 farmers’ data in the two States to empower them in the World Bank-funded climate resilience project. Seventy per cent of these farmers are women.
“In the last eight years, we have digitised 21 lakh farmers, 70 per cent of them in India and 30 per cent in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America,” Kunal Prasad, Co-Founder and COO, CropIn, told BusinessLine .
The platform aims to digitise two crore farmers in the world in the next five years, he said, adding the startup has so far digitised 265 crops and 3,500 crop varieties globally.
The 20,000 farmer beneficiaries in India under the World Bank-supported project are from 200 villages in the flood-prone Madhubani district of Bihar and the drought-prone districts of Sheopur and Mandla, and Gaya (Bihar).
Data-driven farming
CropIn enables data-driven farming by connecting the different players in the agro-ecosystem, including companies working in seed production, agri-input, banking, insurance, government bodies, and development agencies. It operates in 29 countries, mostly emerging markets, and has digitised over 31 lakh acres of farmland, impacting the lives of nearly 16 lakh farmers globally.
The Karnataka Government has partnered with CropIn to adopt data-driven farming solutions in 30 districts, he said.
Changing trends in weather parameters have a significant impact on agriculture, thereby affecting food security, terrestrial ecosystems, economy, human health and social life. To ensure sustainability of farming, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had advocated building climate resilience practices empowering farmers to respond to climate extremities.
The Union Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), supported by the World Bank, initiated the Sustainable Livelihoods and Adaptation to Climate Change (SLACC) Project, implemented the pilot project in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, in partnership with National Rural Livelihoods Project (NRLP) and supported by the State Rural Livelihood Missions (SRLM).
For this project, CropIn provided its climate-smart, weather-based agro advisory module to SLACC to help farmers adapt to climate change. Through this module, CropIn digitised over 90,000 farm plots and helped farmers build sustainability and boost productivity over the last 18 months. The module provided season-wise crop configurations for all the major crops as well as weather-based advisory to SLACC farmers in their local dialect. It encouraged farmers to achieve optimal harvests amid extreme weather by providing end-to-end advisories on farming, from choosing the right crop to identifying the time for harvest.
Making traditional farmers adapt to technology-based advisories was the biggest challenge faced by SLACC. The project empowered over 200 SRLM-appointed locally-trained village resource professionals, equipped with mobile apps, to disseminate information among farmers.
With an advisory adoption rate of 90% and query/issue resolution rate of over 92%, these farmers were able to boost their productivity by 20 per cent . Through this initiative, smallholder and marginal farmers also saved on consultancy/advisory costs.
The CropIn platform has been validated and recommended by the World Bank as a model project for other districts to follow, Prasad said, adding talks are on with the two State governments in this regard.
According to an HSBC study, India is among 67 countries most vulnerable to climate change. These emerging and frontier markets represent almost a third of the world’s nations, 80 per cent of the global population and 94 per cent of global gross domestic product.
A 2017 climate study report stated that for every one degree centigrade rise in temperature, crop yield decreases by 3 per cent to 5 per cent . The mean temperature in India is expected to increase by 0.4° to 2.0°C in the Kharif (monsoon) season and 1.1° to 4.5°C in the Rabi (winter) season by 2070.
With 55 per cent of India’s population depending on agriculture for a living, and nearly 70 per cent living in rural areas that poses a major challenge.
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