Amazon, Microsoft swoop in on India’s vast farm data trove

Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are among technology giants lining up to harness data from India’s farmers in an ambitious government-led productivity drive aimed at transforming an outmoded agricultural industry.

PM Narendra Modi’s administration, which is seeking to ensure food security in the world’s second-most populous nation, has signed preliminary agreements with the three US titans and a slew of local businesses starting April to share farm statistics it’s been gathering since coming to power in 2014. The government is betting the private sector can help farmers boost yields with apps and tools built from information such as crop output, soil quality and land holdings.

Jio Platforms Ltd, the venture controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, and tobacco giant ITC are among local powerhouses that have signed up for the programme, the government said this week.

With the project, PM Modi is seeking to usher in long-due reforms to make over a $488 billion farm sector that employs almost half of the nation’s 1.3 billion people and accounts for about 18% of Asia’s third-biggest economy. The government is counting on the project’s success to boost rural incomes, cut imports, reduce some of the world’s worst food wastages with better infrastructure, and eventually compete with exporters such as Brazil, the US and the EU.

For global firms, it’s a stab at India’s agri-tech industry, which Ernst & Young estimates to have the potential to reach about $24 billion in revenue by 2025, with the current penetration being only 1%. For e-commerce firms such as Amazon and Reliance, securing a steady stream of farm produce could help crack a vast groceries market.

“This is a high impact industry and private players are sensing the opportunity and want to be a large part of it,” said Ankur Pahwa, a partner at consultancy EY India. So far, the government has seeded publicly available data for more than 50 million farmers of the 120 million identified landholding growers.

But success is far from guaranteed. The plan to rope in big corporations is already drawing fire from critics, who say the move is yet another attempt by the government to give the private sector a greater sway. It may even add fuel to the protests the government has been struggling to tackle for more than nine months after controversial new agricultural laws riled up farmers.

“With this data they will know where the produce wasn’t good, and will buy cheap from farmers there and sell it at exorbitant prices elsewhere,” said Sukhwinder Singh Sabhra, a farmer from Punjab, who has been protesting against the new farm laws. “More than the farmers it is the consumers who will suffer.”