Gentle Reminder for Tomorrow's ABM Townhall on "DPIIsation of Indian Agriculture"

Dear Friends,

Tomorrow is a special day! - For the first time, we will do an exclusive ABM Townhall to go down the rabbit hole on Open Networks, Protocols, Digital Public Infrastructure and essentially how to make sense of the third wave of Indian Agritech

We are joined by Rajeesh Menon and Sriram Bharatam who are deep in the woods of building open networks in agriculture.

Sriram built bonafide Agriculture Entrepreneur Networks with the Syngenta Foundation before packing his bags and heading to Kenya to build the world's first open digital agriculture network, powered by the Beckn protocol. His interesting thesis centres on building open networks with village-level agripreneurs at the centre. 

Rajeesh on the other hand has built, led and advised several DPI initiatives, closely seen the evolution of the Beckn Protocol from the builder’s seat and refreshingly advocates for the role of human networks while augmenting technology-mediated open agricultural networks:

“While it’s wonderful to see the promise agri-tech holds on several counts, but as the creators of large DPI-like systems; we certainly can be more imaginative in our design of these. With teething problems like rising farmer-debt, falling food security levels, crop stagnation among other things, Agri-DPI or Agro-networks should strive for nothing less than a step-up from the current to a system that also works for the ones affected the most - a socially responsible, economically viable way.” - Rajeesh Menon (Source)

What is the pathway to achieve this? How do we design better DPI systems that work to address the complexity of agriculture? Are we counting too much on UPI success and underplaying the complexity of agriculture?

Would the centralizing forces of Indian Agriculture drive the DPIIsation of Indian Agriculture through policy mechanisms that enable truly decentralized, peer-to-peer commercial trade? Or would we be facing countervailing forces driven by the federal structure of Indian Agriculture?

We will discuss all these and more. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow (4th February) at 7 PM IST.

Cheers

Venky

P.S. ABM Members can RSVP here to participate in the Zoom meeting LIVE.