The Ministry of Agriculture, on September 27, said on the release that the government will support agri-tech start-ups and work together for the welfare of the farmers and to promote agricultural development.

Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister, Radha Mohan Singh said, “Agriculture plays an important role in the lives of our people and economy of the country where more than 50 per cent of people are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. For the development of the nation, development of agriculture and the farmers are important.”

“The objective of the agriculture development is to double the Farmers’ Income by 2022. With limited resources and fixed area of land availability, it cannot be achieved without the support of technology, which should be low cost, farmer friendly and scalable,” he added.

The Minister also said that the country needs a technological solution in the form of low-cost hand-held soil sensors or any non-destructible method of soil fertility assessment that can easily assess soil health using the technology.

“Technologies desirable for different farmer friendly programs include Sensor Technology, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, App Development, Development of GIS-based portals, low-cost field instruments for various agricultural assessments, etc,” he said.

Singh has also directed his offices to work with a smaller core-teams to continue to work with the start-ups.