India has just overtaken Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, with nominal gross domestic product (GDP) clocking in at US$4.19trn (trillion). Yet, behind this headline triumph lies a serious contradiction. Nearly 65% of India’s population still relies on agriculture and allied activities for their livelihoods—most of them struggling on small plots of land with no glimmer of the country’s newfound economic prestige. Agriculture contributes just 15%-18% to GDP, a disproportionately small share, given its massive employment footprint.
India’s farmers are caught in a web of fragmented land holdings, poor infrastructure, exploitative middlemen and moneylenders, volatile markets, dependency on monsoons and increased climate risks. The last attempt to overhaul the agricultural sector through three controversial farm laws had to be repealed, following nationwide protests, leaving farm policies in limbo. Meanwhile, government schemes to help farmers have multiplied without commensurate results.
Government Efforts
Government-led efforts have been largely through cooperatives, credit schemes and infrastructure. Yet, despite some landmark successes over 60 years that include the green revolution and the milk revolution, the scale of impact in relation to India’s population has remained modest.
The legendary Verghese Kurian’s Anand Milk Union Limited (AMUL), founded in 1946, is the crown jewel. AMUL is now a national brand with highly advanced labs, cold chains and a diverse product range from milk to chocolates. Dr Verghese went on to set up the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965 with impressive results.
Other cooperatives followed. The Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO), established in 1967 dominates fertiliser supply. KRIBHCO and Kerala’s Farmfed support farmers with technical and marketing assistance. The government is now digitising 63,000 primary agricultural cooperative societies (PACS) to improve credit access for 130mn (million) small-holders.
Digital initiatives, under Digital India and BharatNet, promote precision farming with drones, robots and connectivity. Programmes, like the Agriculture Accelerator Fund and Startup India, back infrastructure development, including thousands of warehouses and cold stores.
The farmer producer organisation (FPO) scheme, launched in 2020 to boost collective bargaining among small farmers, had created 10,000 FPOs by 2025, supported with nearly Rs7,000 crore in funding to provide financial aid, equity grants and credit guarantees.
And yet, Indian agriculture remains limited and dysfunctional, while farmer distress and suicides remain unchecked. In the middle this gloomy situation, private efforts at using technology to transform Indian agriculture and make it more efficient and profitable are quietly offering new hope.
Among cooperatives, Nashik’s Sahyadri Farms—a 12-year-old cooperative of 18,000 farmers in Nasik—stands out with 18,000 farmers, 30,000 acres and integrated processing and marketing, focusing on fair pay for smallholders. Another is KisanKonnect which links 5,000 farmers directly with urban consumers in Mumbai and Pune.
Ninjacart focuses on fresh produce supply chains. DeHaat offers end-to-end services to farmers through 8,000 centres, while Intello Labs uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) for crop health monitoring to get realtime information. Stellapps is automating dairy supply chains; CropIn enables precision farming; Bijak facilitates digital lending; and WayCool, AgriApp and Ergos are also working at improving supply chain and storage logistics. KrishHub’s AI reduces vegetable waste by 25%, and AgriBazaar has brokered thousands of crores of rupees in online farm trade.
The most ambitious private effort is Harvesting Farmers Network (HFN) founded by Ruchit Garg. After an 11-year stint at Microsoft and a start-up called 9Slides, Mr Garg returned to India with a singular mission: to make small farms viable through the intelligent use of data.
He launched HFN in 2022 at the height of the COVID lock-downs with an unconventional experiment—connecting farmers directly to buyers via WhatsApp and X. Within days, its handle, @HarvestingFN, had gained 15,000 followers to become a lifeline for many distressed farmers across India.
This low-tech, high-impact strategy allowed farmers to access markets, request information and sell produce. The learnings of this experiment have been effectively used to build a network of over 3mn farmers and 8,900 local intermediaries known as ‘KisanSaarthis’ (helpers), who are essentially agri-university graduates, trained and equipped by HFN to build clusters, coordinate logistics and guide farmers on pricing and quality.
In 2022, HFN raised US$4mn from Social Capital in addition to backing from some globally known philanthropists to expand his reach. The platform’s success is primarily rooted in trust. Farmer identities are verified with Aadhaar and PAN details, while transactions are hand-held from payment collection to transportation. This has the potential to create a new kind of mandi (agricultural marketplace)—decentralised, and increasingly powered by AI and robotics.
The Trust Layer
At the core of HFN’s model is the principle that small farmers cannot individually scale—but they can cooperate – and derive the scale benefits. “One of the core problems with smallholder farmers is that they are small,” Mr Garg explained to me at a recent meeting. “I cannot make them big, but I can help them work together.” The Saarthi model is primarily an entrepreneurial one with initial support and training from HFN. Each Saarthi is provided detailed estimates of a potential market through satellite imagery and AI-powered analytics. Equipped with a phone and HFN app, the Saarthi goes on to create clusters of farmers who can deliver produce to large buyers contracted through HFN. Farmers participating in HFN’s supply chain have seen earnings rise by 2.5 times on average, thanks to better market access, quality grading, packaging and logistics support.
HFN operates in over 13,000 villages, primarily in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and parts of the Northeast. By May 2025, the network had moved 750,000 kilos of fruits and vegetables. Mr Garg points out that this is still a very modest figure relative to India’s potential.
HFN now plans to roll out 100 fully automated micro-mandis, each around 5,000sqft (square feet), equipped with robotic grading and AI for inventory management. This, Mr Garg says, is not just about scaling but also about consistency, accountability and fraud prevention. “If we automate sorting and packing, we can ensure better prices for farmers by improving quality and reducing waste.”
Early experiments have taken HFN from the hills of Meghalaya—where 20,000 kilos of ginger were exported to South Africa—to Kashmir (apples), Manipur (chillies) and beyond. Offline HFN Kisan Centres have sprung up in more than 700 districts, selling seeds, fertilisers and value-added products including oil at reasonable rates. The company is exploring real-time crop health detection via WhatsApp photos and AI diagnostics.
The Data Dividend
HFN’s greatest long-term asset may not be its marketplace, but its data. By tracking crop patterns, acreage and market demand across thousands of villages, it can predict gluts and shortages in real time. “If I know how many farmers have planted onions, I can warn others not to plant more,” Mr Garg says. “There is no accurate data in agriculture today. That’s the root cause of oversupply and price crashes.”
This intelligence could inform farmers as well as policy-makers. The goal, however, is not to become a consultancy—it is to build a self-sustaining ecosystem that rewards farmer trust with economic returns. “I need a large network to create a market, and I need a market to build the network,” Mr Garg notes. “It’s a chicken-and-egg problem; but we’re solving both simultaneously.”
A New Mandate
India’s agriculture needs many things: better irrigation, insurance, storage, pricing transparency and policy clarity. But, above all, it needs new models of cooperation and coordination—ones that don’t merely digitise old inefficiencies, but re-imagine them altogether.
Mr Garg is conscious of the fact that to grow as planned he needs to create a track-record over a three to four year period and earn the trust of farmers. But he is in for the long haul. “India has 6.6 lakh villages and we are only operating in thousands of villages,” he says. But HFN’s approach—networked, nimble and farmer-first—offers a plausible blueprint for transformation.
Comments
abhay1955
5 days ago
Indeed a wonderful information. I am an active buyer from Kisan Konnect through its mobile app. apart from sabzis and fruits, it offers variety of other products like various types of flours, cereals, spices, etc. Combo offer consists of 1 kg each of potato, tomato and onion. Another offer is packed with three types of lassis and shrikhand. I get cow or buffalo milk, curd, paneer, ghee. Mom's kitchen offers sattu and rava ladoo, chakli, atta cookies and some other items. I can select date and time slot and can pay by card, upi, or cash on delivery. They constantly keep on updating the delivery status via SMS. I have also experienced their very transparent system of refund. Once milk and apples were not delivered and by calling on their toll free number, I got the refund within two days. Last week, they could not deliver elaichi banana though money was paid by credit card. But they immediately sent an SMS informing that the money would be refunded, and it got credited to my credit card account. The people at customer care seem to be really caring and speak in very polite manner. Kisan Konnect is punctual and my overall experience is satisfactory.
Heartening, pleasant updates & green shoots. Hopes for mass scale 'financial inclusion' of a vast pool of small farmers, farm workers across the country have faded with the repeal of key farm laws. Country has seen how farm lobbies in certain geographies wield a lot of political clout, exert brute force to resist any kind of changes that can induce and accelerate such inclusion through collective farming and marketing initiatives to achieve right unit economics. Under such circumstances the only plausible way of addressing the malaise in the agri sector is to create a more certain and profitable ecosystem in other geographies that can have a potential to be a beacon for many others including political lobbies to push tweaking agri business models in their constituencies. Change agents such as HFN are a big hope for the country to pool farm resources and form micro agri-societies for fair, remunerative markets with enhanced pricing power and ample short term credit to its members. Govt. should recognise the importance of such change agents and work to replicate it in a large scale by creating newer self fulfilling mechanisms and apparatus.
What a wonderful article that gives hope to readers who want India to succeed and are disheartened by the usual news of cheating and corruption.
Thank you Ms Dalal for bringing this information to us readers.
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