Agri BPO

AgriBPO is a funded project received from the Department of Science and Technology under the Science for Equity Empowerment and Development (SEED) division. This project is an ICT intervention to promote entrepreneurship and development of Women Self Help Groups (SHG) in Salem District, Tamil Nadu, through the establishments of rural Agricultural Support Centers.

Vision

The vision of the project is to leverage the advances in technology to provide information and resolve the factors that impact the productivity and help the target audience cope with situations that are beyond their control, such as crop-disease, weather, market price etc., while training women farmers to emerge as entrepreneurs.

Mission

The major challenge faced by the agricultural industry is meagre utilization of technology to address issues that affect the productivity of the farm products. One way to resolve this issue is to make the farmers aware of the factors that are not under their control. This project is an attempt to resolve such risks associated with the agricultural business and also to help women farmers emerge as entrepreneurs and:

Establish rural agricultural support centers (AgriBPO) for providing agricultural extension services
Develop real time chat application for agriculture sector with alert messages
Develop the Android app – FarmApp
Build website and launch Help Desk for financial and banking services

Services

The project helps to use immense potential of ICTs to create new employment opportunities for rural women and to contribute towards significant gains in the efficiency and effectiveness of rural women enterprises. The working model of the project is of Hub and Spoke model where Sona College of Technology is the Nodal Centre that coordinates with the 5 SHGs, which in turn will communicate with 5 other Kiosks established within them.

Use of conferencing technique to connect farmer to an agricultural expert and fetch answers on time
Use of commodity exchange, pricing options, etc.
Agro Processing, Agricultural advisory services, Agricultural Supply chain Management
Link the SHGs in term of information related to Markets, Banks, Extension Partners and Suppliers, etc.

Agriculture Technology and Start-ups

1. Crofarm Agriproduct Pvt. Ltd.

They are into the following services:

On-demand harvesting
Desired Quality checks
Doorstep delivery

From the perspective of farming, besides guiding the farmers on produce specifications that fetch higher market value, they assure transparency in pricing on time and digitally through their tech enabled system. This helps farmers earn more.

2. Aarav Unmammed System (AUS)

They are professional manufacturers of drones for surveying & mapping, precision agriculture and industrial inspection. They have two products namely Sparrow and Insight. These drones help in survey and inspection of the farm for crop inspection, pest infection and other monitoring facilities for farming.

3. Cropin

Cropin is an intuitive, intelligent, self-evolving system that delivers future-ready farming solutions to the agricultural sector. They provide smarter Agri solutions in real-time that aid in archiving patterns, predict trends and make a blueprint of the business that would help them to increase efficiency, scale productivity and strengthen sustainability of Agri business with complete farm management solutions.

4. Aibono

This is another start up that helps in revolutionizing farming by helping in transforming the way farmers sow, reap sell and live, in precision agriculture where they stabilize the supply and increase farm productivity by tracking farm on different 50 variables employing the technique of data science and domain knowledge, and Syncing supply to demand and getting the best price for the farmers for their produce through Predictive Supply solutions.

5. Goldfarm

The goal of this SME is to provide farmers with products and services through a convenient platform and have a positive impact on their lives. Their services are available in 2 categories: Farm Mechanization, a service where they work to make farm mechanization affordable to small and marginal farmers and Solar water pump solutions where they provide an extensive catalogue of solar water pump for irrigation as they are authorized manufacturer for installing solar water pumps under NABARD subsidy scheme.

6. Ninjacart

This is one of the largest Agri Marketing platforms for vegetables and fruits that help farmers realize more revenue than the existing market for all their produce with proper weighing, doorstep pickup and prompt bank payments.

7. WayCool

The vision of this SME is to organize India’s farm to fork supply chain to deliver cleaner, fresher, and better produce to customers with improved returns to the farmers, thereby lowering the wastage and inefficiencies. They have operations at Chennai, Bengaluru, Coimbatore, Hosur, Krishnagiri, Ooty, Kodaikanal, Yercaud and Yelagiri.

8. Intello Labs

They bring transparency in the Food and Agri supply chain by working on digital agriculture. With their image based solutions they provide insights on the crops health during the growing season and its final harvested quality, by photographing the crops. They also provide solutions on crop infestations.