Dear Readers,

Just wanted to give a heads up about the Agritech dialogue I am hosting with Jagadeesh Sunkad tomorrow at 4 PM IST in Twitter Spaces.

Few years back, Jagadeesh Sunkad and I recorded a series of dialogues on some of the fundamental questions with respect to digitizing Indian Agriculture. Some of those videos found a lot of deep resonance with many agritech friends. I still get emails from many agritech founders who discover those videos and share their excitement.

I am excited to resume a series of dialogues with my mentor Jagadeesh, someone whom I respect deeply for his indefatigable energy to immerse in the potential and ground realities of Agriculture.

Standing in 2022, Indian Agriculture presents a picture of contradictions.

When the Indian Govt repealed the farm laws, many felt upset by the lack of reforms in Indian Agriculture. The pandemic happened and we saw that those systems - 'the paddy-wheat centric Minimum Support Price (MSP) and procurement regime and the public distribution system (PDS)' – which was heavily criticized, provided an extremely beneficial safety net for so many in this country.

Come this Kharif cropping season, we will get to see what happens when drones are introduced into Indian agriculture.

The timing couldn’t be more, hmm, well, inappropriate. Drones are being introduced at a time when we are witnessing the age-old truism of ‘Indian Agriculture being ‘the oldest and most absorptive ‘sponge’ for surplus labour.’

If the recent data from the periodic labour force survey (PLFS) is to be believed,

“46.18 million additional jobs generated between 2018-19 and 2019-20 nearly 70 per cent of them are reported to have been created in agriculture. To put it in figures, this represents an estimated 32.72 million additional agricultural jobs compared to only 1.65 million in manufacturing and 3.58 million in construction."

How do we make sense of the contradictions that define Agriculture? How do we make sense of the potential and challenges in Indian Agriculture? These and more questions will be dealt with in this Agritech Samvaad (Dialogue) Session. You can RSVP here.

Feel free to share your questions /reflections at the top of your mind. I’ll bring them up with due credits during the dialogue.

Cheers,

Venky