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Upcoming Agripreneur Meets

We have couple of Agripreneur Meets coming up, besides the big one at Srinagar in Kashmir.

Hyderabad Agripreneurs Meet
Date: 26th May 2026
Venue: Amro Cafe, Gachibowli
Time: 730 PM to 930 PM

RSVP

Bengaluru Agripreneurs Meet
Date: 28th May 2026
Venue: Chocolate Room, Whitefield, Bengaluru
Time: 4 PM to 6 PM
RSVP

Godzilla, in Japanese cinema, is the patron saint of unintended consequences. A creature born from radiation that humans themselves released, grown beyond any human capacity to control.

The more I think about fertilizer subsidy, the more I am left wondering about the eerie parallels.

India's fertilizer subsidy for FY27 is budgeted at about ₹1.71 lakh crore, more than the entire ₹1.33 lakh crore the Union Budget set aside for agriculture and farmers' welfare that same year. And that figure was fixed before the Strait of Hormuz closed. The Department of Fertilizers' own preliminary estimate now puts the FY27 outgo at around ₹2.3 lakh crore.

The instrument built to support the farm sector now costs more than the ministry built to support the farm sector. How the hell did we get into this mess?

A 45-kg bag of urea landed at port in late April this year cost roughly $935 a tonne, almost double the February price, which works out to around ₹3,600 wholesale per bag.

The farmer paid ₹242 at the shop the next morning, the same price he has paid since April 2018. Every paisa of the ₹3,358 gap was absorbed by the taxpayer. The number on the bag has not moved in eight years.

Eight Years.

Before the shocks, the bill ran around ₹80,000 crore a year. Then every single year overshot its own budget. ₹70,000 crore budgeted in FY21 became ₹138,000 crore actual. ₹80,000 crore became ₹162,000 crore in FY22. The FY23 peak hit ₹254,000 crore against a ₹105,000 crore plan. FY26 budgeted ₹167,000 crore and is landing near ₹217,000 crore.

The difference is what it costs to keep ₹242 frozen while the world price moved. The FY27 bill alone is roughly equal to the Union health budget and four times the rural roads outlay. The monster now has a claim on the national budget and everything else, from irrigation to agricultural research to rural health.

It eats only after it has been fed. So who holds the leash of this monster?

The money comes from the Ministry of Finance, but the subsidy is administered by the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, not even by Agriculture. Unlike the EU and the US, which hand support to farmers directly and let prices float, India suppresses the price of the bag while propping up the floor price of the crop, breeding market distortions of Godzilla proportions on both sides of the farm gate.

We are back to my favourite wicked problem that bamboozles this sector. Aren’t we?

Principal-Agent Problem

The principal (Ministry of Finance) who pays has no operational control, the agent (Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers) who administers has no incentive to shrink the programme, and the cultivator the whole apparatus claims to serve is the one party whose actual behaviour nobody is pricing.

Why has it been so difficult to control this monster? Three man-made feedback loops and one biological feedback loop are at play.

The first is the frozen price.

Once ₹242 is held through a crisis it becomes politically encoded and stuck in a vicious deadlock. It becomes impossible to raise during a shock as the optics are catastrophic. It becomes impossible to raise after a shock, as the upward move looks gratuitous. The number continues to get more stuck. On 28 June 2023, the government formally notified that urea would stay at ₹242 a bag for another three years, and it committed ₹3.68 lakh crore to hold that line.

India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman spake thus in Mumbai earlier in the month of April: 2026 "Didn't we do that during Covid? Farmers paid the same price as before. We never shifted the burden to them."

Can you see what is happening here?

The second is the manufacturer-solvency loop.

India imports roughly a fifth of its urea and nearly all of its phosphatic fertilizer. All those tonnes are physically brought in by a handful of producers and traders who bid in government import tenders. They will only do so if assured the government will reimburse them the gap between the global landed cost and the regulated price the farmer pays.

When world prices spike, the importer is in trouble. Subsidy dues become arrears. The fixed nutrient-based subsidy becomes stagnant, leaving the importer to sell at a loss.

The rational response of the importer in such conditions is to stop bidding. The tender comes back empty and the fertilizer does not arrive, leading to dry depots, queues, black-market diversion.

The government is held hostage by its own supply chain, unable to trim the subsidy without risking that the bags never show up. The subsidy is not just a price support but the standing payment that keeps the importers willing to keep the bags moving.

Here is a detailed infographic based on an excellent Swarajya piece (albeit too AI-esque) on what it takes to keep the price of a bag of urea stable.

The third is the gas-import absorption loop.

Or, in simple words, why we are screwed even when India produces 80% of its urea requirement domestically.

Urea is, chemically, little more than solidified natural gas. The gas supplies both the hydrogen feedstock and the energy to bind it with nitrogen drawn from the air. It makes up roughly 60 to 80 per cent of the cost of producing a tonne.

So what if India manufactures around eighty per cent of its urea at home when a large share of that production runs on imported LNG?

Since domestic producers are reimbursed on the same cost-plus basis as importers, every rise in the landed gas price passes almost directly into their cost of production, and with the farmer's price frozen at ₹242, almost the entire increase lands on the subsidy bill rather than at the shop.

This leaves India permanently exposed to global gas markets with no hedge against them. A tanker held up at Hormuz surfaces, months later, as a hole in the Indian budget.

The fourth feedback loop is not political, or economic, but biological.

The more fertilizer a field receives, the faster it loses the organic matter that lets soil hold water and nutrients, which lowers the soil's own fertility, which forces the farmer to add still more fertilizer merely to hold the same yield.

Each of these feedback loops reinforces each other. Every fertilizer reform attempt since the Soil Health Card Era of 2015 has faced the same chokepoint due to these feedback loops.

This absurdity is compounded by the killers of the cereal hamster wheel. The government announces minimum support prices for more than twenty crops, but procures only rice, wheat, and sugarcane at any scale.

Farmers rationally grow those three which swallow more than two-thirds of all the urea in India. The cereal-and-cane monoculture has quietly killed the pulse and legume rotations that sustained Indian agriculture for millennia. In those rotations the legume fixes its own nitrogen out of the air and leaves some behind for the next crop, needing no urea at all or a tenth of what a cereal demands.

Today, India now grows roughly twice the rice it eats, exporting forty per cent of it and diverting another nine per cent to bioethanol for blending with petrol. A substantial share of that subsidized, soil-degrading, climate-warming nitrogen leaves the country embedded in grain or burns in our fuel tanks.

Can you imagine the shuddering implications when more than two-thirds of the ₹2 lakh crore spent on fertilizer subsidy each year is never harvested as food at all, but lost to pollution?

Plants take up only 35 to 40 per cent of the nitrogen applied, and the rest escapes, much of it as ammonia into the air and as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide, while most of the phosphatic fertilizer washes away into the water.

Neem-coating the urea has done nothing to halt this ammonia loss.

What about Nano Urea? Can a 500-ml bottle replace a full 45-kg bag? Can 44 crores a bottle a year ensure that India would no longer need to import urea at all?

Let’s do the math.

A 45-kg bag is 46 per cent nitrogen. It carries about 20 kilograms of it. A 500-ml bottle of nano-urea, at 4 per cent nitrogen by volume, carries about 20 grams.

The agronomists The Hindu consulted put the problem in crop terms: A wheat crop draws roughly 25 kilograms of nitrogen from the field to yield a tonne, and a plant never takes up all the nitrogen it is given.

N.K. Tomar, a retired soil science professor, ran the numbers. Even if a plant absorbed every last gram of the 20 grams in a nano-urea bottle, it would yield about 368 grams of wheat grain, against the roughly 496 kilograms a conventional bag supports at 60 per cent uptake.

Twenty grams misted onto leaves cannot stand in for the 20 kilograms a bag provides.

IFFCO's own field trials, run across thousands of plots, reported an average yield increase of about 8 per cent. It could be useful as a supplement, but nowhere near the doubling that replacing a whole bag would require.

Even the former ICAR director-general under whom the product was cleared has said the proof of its benefit is still awaited.

What about DBT transfer?

Analysts like Uttam Gupta talk often about decontrolling fertilizer outright: Scrap the price and distribution controls, let the MRP find its own level, and protect poor farmers with a direct cash transfer instead of a hidden subsidy buried in the bag.

Here is the thing.

DBT transfers cannot work in isolation without working on the soil.

We cannot simply wish the problem away by only changing who pays without considering what the money would buy. Cash-transfer reform and the soil-rebuilding work have to move together.

Now that we recognize the false silver bullets, can we take a full stock of where we are.

It is pretty absurdly ironic, if you come to think of it.

The creature born to feed the country has begun, quietly, to poison it, and the budget that sustains the creature grows every year.

Let’s be clear. It’s not that India doesn’t understand what needs to be done to tackle this monster.

In his Mann ki Baat address of November 2017, the Prime Minister asked the nation to halve fertilizer use within five years. The consumption naturally rose as there were no clear machinery to coordinate the words into action.

The Inter-ministerial National Nitrogen Steering Committee, as Nandula Raghuram points out in her excellent piece, set up to provide exactly that coordination, saw its tenure expire before a single one of its recommendations was acted upon.

PM-PRANAM was launched in June 2023 to share half of any subsidy savings with states that cut chemical fertilizer.

The states, believe it or not, delivered the goods.

Fourteen states cut their fertilizer consumption by 1.51 million tonnes in 2023-24. Karnataka delivered 30 per cent of the savings and Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Andhra Pradesh delivered another 58 per cent. The Parliamentary Standing Committee reported on 13 March 2026 that not a single rupee had been disbursed.

The steering committee meant to run the transfers had met twice in three years. The Cabinet note had been withheld under RTI, The scheme sunset on 31 March 2026 having paid out nothing.

I am sorry to be blunt. Today, given our political timidity, we can never kill this monster.

At best, we could tame it. If we are serious about change, where do we begin? Here is a series of recommendations from the short term to the medium term to the long term.

Short Term Recommendations for the next six to 12 months:

1. Operationalize PM-PRANAM retroactively. Pay Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Andhra Pradesh for the reductions they have already banked, an outlay of perhaps ₹3,000 to ₹4,000 crore against a ₹2 lakh crore envelope. There are obviously fiscal implications that I haven’t fully considered, but the precedent this sets is enormous and is worth the risk. It establishes, for the first time, that the Centre will pay a State to use less fertilizer.

2. Fund The Pre-Monsoon Dry Sowing, the practice Andhra Pradesh's community-managed natural farming programme has grown into a hundred-thousand-farmer movement over five years, anchored in the semi-arid drylands of Anantapuram and now codified into nine ecological principles.

The economics have moved far enough to justify a serious scaling bet. A 2023 True Cost Accounting study of APCNF found yields 11 per cent higher, farmer net incomes 49 per cent higher, and crop diversity 88 per cent higher than on comparable conventional farms, alongside a fall of more than 50 per cent in pesticide and fertilizer use. The Kutch adaptation in saline, drought-stressed Gujarat shows that pelletised dry sowing could survive even India's harshest geographies.

3. Plug the 20–25 per cent urea diversion. Subsidized urea continues to leak into industrial use — resin, plywood, dairy adulteration — despite neem-coating and PoS authentication. The Economic Survey of 2015-16 once put total leakage, including smuggling across borders, as high as 40 per cent. A focused crackdown on industrial diversion, particularly in the resin and plywood corridors of UP, Punjab, and Gujarat, could recover ₹15,000–20,000 crore annually without touching MRP or supply.

4. Linking Soil Health Card recommendations with fertilizer purchase at PoS can definitely push the needle. More than 23 crore cards have been issued since 2015. But the data is being poorly used to simply monitor the scheme rather instead of shaping how fertilizer is sold. A farmer with high-nitrogen soil can still buy as many urea bags as he likes. Where farmers do follow their card's recommendations, government assessments report chemical-fertilizer use falling by 8 to 10 per cent with yields holding or rising. Wiring that advice into the point of sale, so soil data is cross-checked against what is actually being bought, would turn a card farmers can ignore into a nudge at the moment of purchase. This is also a good DPI use-case.

5. Commission the bio-input resource centres. National Mission on Natural Farming aims for 10,000 BRCs, cluster-level units that supply ready-to-use bio-inputs. The central assistance is modest with ₹1 lakh per centre. The real constraint is not money, but the infrastructure and entrepreneurs the grant does not cover. Bio-inputs are punishingly labor-intensive. Substituting a quintal of chemical NPK can demand a trolley of manure and several rounds of bioculture. We need more innovations that can address this. I know of few entrepreneurs addressing this.

Medium Term Recommendations for FY 28 - 30 - This is where we tackle structural reforms.

1. Bring urea under the nutrient-based subsidy regime. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices recommended this in its 2023 Kharif non-price recommendations, and the Sharad Pawar committee first urged it back in 2012. Urea's exclusion is the fundamental reason why its price stayed frozen while phosphatic and potassic prices drifted up. Addressing this distortion is critical in addressing the overuse of nitrogen in our soil systems.

2. Index the Urea bag price to inflation at four to six per cent a year. Let’s not treat farmers with kid gloves. They understand.

3. Shift the direct transfer from the landholder to the actual cultivator. This closes the trapdoor that excludes the ten million hectares of leased-in land farmed by tenants who own nothing on paper. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are pioneering efforts in bringing tenants into the ambit of the system. Early days. Lot can be done in this regard.

4. Broaden procurement beyond rice, wheat, and sugarcane. Put real purchasing weight behind pulses and oilseeds, as farmers will grow what the state reliably buys. The vehicle exists in the Dalhan Aatmanirbharta Mission, launched in October 2025 with ₹11,440 crore to lift pulse output to 350 lakh tonnes. As of April, pulse area up grew barely 1.26 per cent, against a ten per cent fall over the preceding three years. Growing pulses will fix nitrogen in the soil and reduce our foreign exchequer with self-reliance on pulses.

5. The Talcher coal-gasification plant in Odisha, India's first, was supposed to add 12.7 lakh tonnes of coal-based urea a year and cut LNG dependence. It has slipped repeatedly from its original 2024 deadline and sat at roughly two-thirds complete in early 2025. Can we get it running?

   Long Term Recommendations - This where we focus on Atma Nirbharta (Self-Reliance)

6. Scale green ammonia. The SECI tender that closed on 30 March 2026 allocated 724,000 tonnes a year across thirteen fertilizer plants, on ten-year fixed-price contracts at ₹49.75 to ₹64.74 a kilogram, roughly half what Europe's benchmark auctions discovered.

   India holds an advantage Europe and Korea do not: solar irradiance, a domestic electrolyser buildout, and a captive offtake market. The catch is water. Splitting water for hydrogen takes around 9 litres per kilogram on the chemistry alone, and 20 to 30 litres once purification and cooling are counted, and the green ammonia made from that hydrogen needs the same input at scale.

7. We need to hedge the geography of our fertiliser supply, because the import map is dangerously concentrated. Nearly 70 per cent of urea imports come from a handful of Gulf states — Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. Potash is imported in full, drawn from Canada, Russia, Belarus, and Israel. About 80 per cent of phosphoric acid comes from Jordan, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, and China. The diversification already under way runs along two tracks: securing finished product through long-term offtake deals, such as the five-year agreements signed in 2025 with Morocco's OCP and with Saudi Arabia, and building processing capacity at home, as with Coromandel's new acid plant and Paradeep Phosphates' expansion. Both routes chip away at the single-chokepoint exposure that the Strait of Hormuz represents.

   A Togliatti urea venture in Russia would do the same on the nitrogen side. Fast-tracked in December 2025, the ₹20,000 crore project is a 50:50 joint venture between Russia's Uralchem and a consortium of Indian state firms, Indian Potash, RCF, and NFL. It is designed to produce two million tonnes of urea a year, the entire output earmarked for India, by leveraging Russia's cheap gas, and is expected to be operational by 2027-28.

   More than 70 per cent of India’s fertilizer imports currently pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and a dedicated plant on the far side of Eurasia routes around that single point of failure.

8. Instead of paying a fertilizer manufacturer for a molecule delivered, can we pay the grower for an outcome held in the soil, whether that is organic carbon built, nitrogen-use efficiency improved, or nitrous oxide avoided? The protocols are still maturing. The revenue rail is coming into view through the jurisdictional carbon-credit work the government has been exploring with the Environmental Defense Fund, and through the emerging Indian carbon market.

9. India can build on G20 Leadership and take lead in reviving the Inter-ministerial National Nitrogen Steering Committee. Would Modi lead the way, now that he has been awarded Agricola Award by FAO?

As history has often taught us, every crisis is a wonderful opportunity . Shall we convert this crisis into an opportunity?

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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State of Agritech - 20th May 2026

1/ Wingreens Picks Safe Harvest

Why did Wingreens acquire Safe Harvest? Would Safe Harvest follow the same trajectory Raw Pressery did when it was acquired by Wingreens in 2021? Although it is pointless, what could have Safe Harvest done differently?

2/Decoding Fragaria’s and Oishii’s Vertical Farming Thesis

Amidst a graveyard of vertical farming failures, how to make sense of Fragaria’s and Oishii’s thesis? Is it time to revisit my bearish outlook on vertical farming?

3/ Update on FMC India’s $252 million distress sale to Crystal Crop Protection

4/ Is Gates Foundation Chasing Rainbows?

Rainbow Crops Awarded $7M Grant by Gates Foundation to Advance Climate-Resilient Crops. Climate resilience could be built two ways. What are those? Where can Rainbow Crops’ combinatorial approach work realistically? Where it cannot?

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

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In a moment of visible anguish, he turned to me and said, “My medicines are working more slowly these days because the food you eat is no longer food. The milk you drink is not milk. If you had eaten better food, I would have cured you faster.”

It was a powerful penny drop moment that viscerally showcased the interplay between food and health systems.

Traditional medicine treatment rests on three pillars: Ahara (food), Vihara (behavioral regulation), and Aushadi (medicine). Medicine is one leg of the tripod. When food quality collapses, the tripod loses a leg.

When the herbs themselves are degraded — essential oils stripped from pepper before it reaches the market, soils so depleted the plant cannot biosynthesize what it once did — the tripod loses a second leg.

The medicine carries the full burden of what was designed to be a shared load. The framework quietly fails.

In Part I, Dr. A.V. Balasubramanian — co-founder of CIKS, trained biophysicist, student of the Krishnamacharya lineage — traced the philosophical foundations of Vrikshayurveda (Ancient Indian Plant Science) and its central institutional problem: What do we do when the texts survive, but the practitioner chain that once translated them into farm practice doesn’t?

Part II moves from the philosophical to the operational.

We explored the immediate low-hanging opportunities for entrepreneurs. We grappled with the infrastructural gap that comes in the way of better adoption of traditional sciences. We mapped where modern technologies could complement traditional systems.

Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited transcript of the conversation for those who want to go into the greyness and nuance we explored. Always remember. The Map is not the Territory.

Venky: I want to start with a fundamental question about the relationship between Ayurveda and Vrikshayurveda. We understand that some of the underlying principles are common to both humans and plants. But I also want to explore where the similarities end and the divergences begin.

Dr.AVB: At a very fundamental level, the basic principles of worldview are shared in terms of the composition of matter and how we understand biological change. The Panchamahabhuta siddhant, the idea that all matter is composed of five Mahabhutas (Akasha Ether, Vayu Air, Agni Fire, Jala Water and Prithvi Earth) and Tridosha, that all prakriti (Nature) is constituted by a balance of Vata (The Energy of Movement), Pitta (The Energy of Transformation), and Kapha (The Energy of Stability) is shared by all life forms, be it humans or animals or plants.

However, when it comes to practical applications, the situation is very different.

The practical goal in Ayurveda is to help someone in good health maintain it, irrespective of changes in the environment and help them come out of it and restore proper balance, if a person is struck with disease or disorder. For that work, apart from the basic texts, you have an enormous amount of principles spelled out in commentaries and a living body of practitioners.

Nobody can read a text like Charaka Samhita and simply get into practice. There is a whole lot that links the text to the actual prayogam (usage).

There is no institutionally trained body of scholars well-versed in Vrikshayurveda. There are hundreds of scholars across India deeply knowledgeable in Charaka Samhita, Sushruta Samhita, Agastya Gunapadam, Siddha and Unani texts. They have read commentaries, written commentaries, translated many of those into practice. We are not able to find any such body of scholars in Vrikshayurveda.

Venky: Is Ministry of Ayush1 also not able to do this?

Dr. AVB: Ayush didn't even consider it part of their mandate. They woke up later and said they have to do something about it. At the fundamental conceptual level, in the case of a human you can say that among the building blocks there are seven dhatus — Rasa (Plasma/Lymph), Rakta (Blood), Mamsa (Muscle), Majja (Bone Marrow & Nervous Tissue), Meda (Fat/Adipose), Asthi (Bones and Cartilage), Shukra (Reproductive Tissue)

Nobody has clearly spelled this out in Vrikshayurveda.

We know we cannot map those exact seven dhatus into plants. There are some things approximately corresponding, but nothing with a clear one-to-one. So that makes it quite a challenge to translate certain principles in Vrikshayurveda texts into actual prayogam (usage)

It is strange that somebody like me — not really a practitioner of Ayurveda — got interested and strayed into this. Sometimes I create a particular yukti, a strategy, for treating some plant disease. I voice it to a Bradman class Ayurvedic scholar, a real Acharya and ask what do they think. They would be very interested and say that logically, the chain of reasoning you set out is flawless. But you have to test it out in practice. We have no basis to say whether it is right or not till you put it to actual practice.

Venky: Let us say 150 years ago, somebody in Varanasi or from South India, wakes up and says, “I want to start my journey to become a Vrikshayurveda Acharya”. Could you speculate on what that journey would have been — in the colonial times, or prior to British rule, whichever you feel comfortable with? Sometime back, if there is somebody with a genuine interest — I recently met this gentleman who is calling Vrikshayurveda Agro Ayurveda, Ravi Singh Choudary, who is just attempting to learn this and go deeper — how could he become an Acharya today?

Dr. AVB: I don’t think Vrikshayurveda had a parampara (tradition) of that kind. Almost any Ayurvedic text that tells you how the text came down to you will mention a Guru Parampara — he taught it to Indra, Indra taught it to so-and-so, and through a lineage it came down to you. A similar thing you find in yoga texts like Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The Vrikshayurveda texts we have encountered do not specify a similar Guru Parampara.

So 150 years ago, if somebody woke up, it is very unlikely he would say he wants to become a Vrikshayurveda Acharya, as the term itself would not be there in his mind. That does not mean the expertise doesn’t exist.

But unlike Jyotisha — where there would be court scholars, folk practitioners, people who do Kuri Solrathu, various levels from whom you could learn, and then specializations like Nadi Jyotisha, Grantha Jyotisha, Fala Jyotisha and the calculation aspects of Siddhanta — Vrikshayurveda never had that kind of a parampara (tradition). It is not quite clear to me if it ever did.

Having said this, I must also say that Vrikshayurveda is extremely vast. Even though it has been a 30–35 year journey and we have explored various things, there are lots of byways which are fascinating that we did not pursue.

We preferred to stick to pathways with practical utility. Can it help crack the problem of certain pests that are proving very difficult by chemical methods, can it help improve the quality and quantity of harvest of certain crops? There are enormous other questions in Vrikshayurveda that I have parked. For example, Vrikshayurveda has some fascinating things about forecasting weather — short-term, medium-term, long-term. mind-boggling things. I have parked that, maybe even for a future janma (rebirth)

Venky: Few years ago, one of my favourite Ayurveda Acharyas, whom I consulted for my family, once said in a moment of anguish: my medicines today are working slowly because the kind of food you eat has become rotten. The kind of milk you drink is not milk. If you had eaten better food, my medicine would have cured you much faster. It is a statement I remembered for a very long time. It is also a fundamental question especially with the kind of climate change we are seeing — we are seeing a lot of nutrient collapse in plant life.

Are you seeing any sort of shift in the way some of these medicines are prepared? When you talk about barks and bringing in these plant materials — is that also affecting the performance of these formulations over time?

Dr. AVB: I will communicate two things.

One, at the the larger level, why there is such an obsession about food alongside medicine. In the framework of Ayurveda, at a physical level, if you are in harmony and good balance, you are in good health. Anything that triggers an imbalance is what disease is. To restore this balance, there are three pillars: ahara, vihara, and aushadi — food, behavioral changes, and medicine.

If I have a certain Kapha aggravation, my vaidya would tell me: you should be off curds completely, or at least at night; avoid refrigerated and reheated foods. That is the chunk of advice about food. Regarding behavior, he might say: absolutely no sleep in the daytime, that will just aggravate your Kapha; do bathe in cold water. Then the third aspect is medicine. Medicine is really one third of the armory. So when your vaidya says in anguish — with this kind of food, what can I do?

You are like a two-legged man, limping on one leg.

Second, on the quality of herbs, I have a famous Siddha vaidya friend in Chennai who told me: If you look at the properties of spices spelled out in Siddha texts, like Pepper and Turmeric, those properties are so fantastic that if you are regularly having them along with a regular South Indian diet, it should boost your health. But the quality of herbs in the market is very poor. A lot of people who put pepper out in the market have extracted certain essential oils from it first before it gets to the market. He was investing time, energy, and money to create his own plantations to harvest herbs. I asked why, given he was already running an Ayurveda college and Siddha college. He said: unless I invest in the quality of drugs, they are simply not working.

So the quality of herbs is one thing. And if you cannot regulate your food in the manner that was once possible, it badly affects how the medicine works. Even if someone comes and symptomatically improves with medicine, to put them in proper balance in terms of restoring the three doshas, you have to have activity at all three levels.

I will share one anecdote about vihara (behavioural regulation).

Several years back in Pune, there was a friend who came for a meeting where there was also a vaidya. This friend was an extremely intense person — the kind where if you sit near them, you feel they are radiating something. He had a horrible digestion problem. The vaidya felt his pulse and asked a strange question: Is there any long-standing habit that you gave up very abruptly? The man looked shocked and said yes. He had been a chain smoker for thirty years, but someone who can take an oath and live through it. Once, in a group of friends, somebody challenged him. He took a puff and said: This is the last puff.

I am not going to smoke anymore. A thirty-year-old habit changed abruptly. The vaidya told him he had made a mistake there. You may have the determination, but your body is acclimatized to certain habits. There is a stepwise way you should have gotten out of that habit. Because you did it abruptly, your body is not able to adjust. So this shows it is not just medicine, not just food — these habits are very important.

Venky: Today, a large part of farmers have inculcated certain habits, thanks to the influences of Western agronomy imposed through retailers and others. Seed treatment has become a very serious activity. Are there Vrikshayurveda practices that modern agronomy has rediscovered? I am just taking seed treatment as one example.

Dr. AVB: The classic example is neem. Around 1950/60s, neem as a biopesticide or bio-agent was hardly known in the West. There is a folk story that the India International Centre in Delhi has some magnificent neem trees. Somebody visiting saw that got curious and pursued it. Neem has been used in India since time immemorial for pest control, crop protection, and so many things. The West became conscious of its potential and began to investigate it. Over a period of time, they did what the West does best with herbs — they fractionated it and asked: which particular component seems to be giving the bioactivity in terms of pesticidal properties? They zeroed upon azadirachtin.

People started manufacturing CNFs — commercial neem formulations — with varying concentrations of azadirachtin. The West has done this repeatedly with so many herbs. Sarpagandha was a herb used traditionally in Ayurveda. Fractionation led to the alkaloid reserpine.

The neem story does not end there. 10-15 years ago, there was a paper that looked at the LD50 value of various commercial neem formulations.

You would expect that as the azadirachtin concentration goes higher, it becomes more potent, so the LD50 value decreases. What was found is that beyond a point, it does not decrease — it seems to increase. We picked up azadirachtin, went on concentrating that molecule, and beyond a particular point it loses its efficacy.

One possible answer — which I think should be checked out — is that the effect of neem oil when applied is not just because of a single molecule azadirachtin, but because of a synergistic effect of a family of molecules. As you concentrate azadirachtin more and more, you lose some of the other substances and lose a certain balance. This is precisely the kind of approach that an arka or an asava carries — a family of substances in relationship, at a formulation level that does not require corrosive solvents, high temperature, or high pressure. It is much more moderate-scale friendly. So it is within the reach of a lot of people.

Venky: Let’s take chilli thrips. It is a big challenge, especially for viruses, traditional agronomy has a bit of a hands-off approach. You have to keep the plant healthy, and if it is caught, you have to only clear it off. So does Vrikshayurveda offer an alternative in these kinds of contexts? I know all the questions are still coming from a very conventional viewpoint. What are the areas where modern agronomy has a hands-off approach, and are there areas where Vrikshayurveda says this is something we cannot treat? Like, even in modern health science, immunological conditions or inflammation conditions — there is still a lot of research and complexity evolving there. I am just trying to bring these two approaches in contrast.

Dr. AVB: In the philosophical framework of Ayurveda, if you look at health, disease, and curing, disease may have three possible approaches. Sadhya — you can cure it. Krichra sadhya — with difficulty you can cure it. Asadhya — you cannot cure it, you can only manage the symptoms to some extent. For certain patients, Ayurveda may take the view that within the framework of our Shastra, we have no cure. We will look at the comfort level of the patient, see if we can manage them in reasonable health. That recognition is itself part of the framework.

I recently experienced this with an 86-year-old relative who fell into a coma. His close family decided to keep him at home so he could pass in peace, surrounded by the chanting of the Vishnu Sahasranama. He passed away a few days later. Sometime after, his treating doctor learned that my relative had premium health insurance. Visibly offended, the doctor told me he would have taken an 'aggressive approach.' When I asked what he meant, he suggested an exploratory operation. I was appalled. For an 86-year-old man whose family had accepted his time had come, what purpose would an exploratory surgery serve? The stark contrast between our family's acceptance and the doctor's reaction perfectly illustrates the gap between a system that recognizes asadhya and one that does not.

More than thirty years back, we had one of our early experiences at Theosophical Society campus in Chennai. It is a 300-plus acre plot. There was a grove of mango trees very badly affected. The guard and superintendent of that time was my high school classmate. He said: we don’t believe in using harsh chemicals — do you think you can do anything with the approach of Vrikshayurveda? So we went and took a look. Our diagnosis was that certain branches were very badly affected — they had to be cut off and burnt. Other branches were mildly affected.

The prescription for those was two things: make a mixture of neem and Pungam oil with soap solution and spray it, and fumigate it with fumes of Daruharitra and Vacha. This really arrested the further spread of the disease. The plants put forth new and fresh shoots and they got a yield that year — not a normal yield, a subdued yield, but the plants were revived.

This is possible because it was a tree, and you could distinguish affected from unaffected parts. If it is a smaller plant in a grove, about 10–20% of the plants may be very badly affected and may have to be sacrificed. You can only learn a lesson for the future — at the time of planting, pre-treat in this way.

Ayurveda also recognizes that disease goes through various stages: the purva rupa, the emerging phase when symptoms are not yet quite manifest; then symptoms are manifest, then strongly manifest, then full-blown. At what stage you catch it makes all the difference.

Venky: Was there a particular community that had ownership of this knowledge? In the Tamil context, the vellalar community had a big roles. Did they actively own it, or was the healer a separate community that took charge? How was that ownership structured?

Dr. AVB: Sometimes if you look at particular branches of knowledge or shastra that work with restricted materials — stone masonry, wood, jewelry — there is only a small specialized community who needs to work with it. Plants and agriculture involve a huge portion of the Indian population. They interact with plants because they cultivate food, harvest it, and use plants as medicine. So knowledge of a certain kind regarding agriculture and plants is very widely spread — it is not the prerogative of any particular community.

There have also been local specialists. Even today in many parts of India you would see: this family gives treatment for jaundice; there are traditional bone-setters, not college-trained, but a well-established tradition; there are visha chikitsa specialists. Ayurvedic texts will even say what stage of maturity of a particular plant you should harvest and cook it. There is a sloka which says: Vatakam komalam pathyam, kushmandam komalam visham. If you use brinjal when it is tender, it is beneficial; if you use it when very ripe, it is not wholesome. With white pumpkin, it is the other way — you should use it properly ripened. But you don’t have to read an Ayurvedic text to know that. Any person who knows how to cook would know this. That type of knowledge is very widely dispersed.

What is more specialized is eco-specific cultivation knowledge — people along coastal regions have preserved certain varieties of paddy tolerant of salinity; Basmati is cultivated at high altitudes in certain places. There is a lot of niche-specific knowledge dispersed among the people who live in those locations.

Venky: For a knowledge system to be alive, it must also create newer forms of knowledge. I was in Pune recently and met an Ayurveda vaidya, Dr. Yogesh Bendale, who has come up with newer rasayans treating various forms of cancer — he was talking about research on prostate cancer documented in a few journals.

Are there newer forms of formulation that can be created based on the principles of Vrikshayurveda that have not been spelled out in any text? Are you looking at creating newer formulations just based on the principles?

Dr. AVB: I can give various examples. Take Ayurvedic or Patyashastra texts — they talk about cuisine, properties of various preparations, kanji and various other preparations. Sometime back an Ayurvedic physician wrote an article called “Custard: An Ayurvedic Study.” Custard is not a classical preparation known in traditional kitchens. But the materials of which it is made and the process can be described and analyzed. More than thirty years back, a couple of us edited a monograph called “Ayurvedic Principles of Food and Nutrition” in two parts. I invited him to contribute this as a chapter.

Based on Panchamahabhuta Siddhant and Tridosha Vichat, he analyzed what custard does in terms of Vata, Pitta, Kapha, and the dhatus — who it is helpful for, who it is contraindicated for. This entire analysis was performed based on Ayurvedic principles applied to something completely new.

Other formulations — kashaya, arka — you can use them with newer materials, and people are continuously doing it. One of the most interesting examples: Vinay Pereira recorded that more than 25–30 years back in the Karjat tribal area in Maharashtra, the tribals were using the seed of Acacia auriculiformis.

Introduced by the forest department, this non-native pea-pod is used to catch fish without killing them. Locals dam a gently flowing stream and add a paste made from the seeds, which temporarily stupefies the fish. They float to the surface for easy picking, and the rest revive once the stones are removed. What is truly fascinating is the rapid local adaptation: tribal communities independently discovered this use within just a few years of the seed arriving from Australia, where this technique is completely unknown.

There are instances of older substances being put to newer use, and newer substances being put to newer use also. There is a lot of creativity in the sense that the method that is there is being applied to so many classical substances and so many newer substances — it may even include synthetic substances; there are instances of that.

Venky: Today, on a countrywide scale, our cotton yields have plummeted drastically. We’ve lost the native varieties of cotton. Some of them are still being revived. If we were to come up with a research agenda based on what are the most pressing problems that have to be addressed in Indian agriculture, from the point of view of Vrikshayurveda, what would be the top three areas you would prioritize?

Dr. AVB: Strategically, I must say this: Vrikshayurveda is something people may still slot as exotic, some kid’s bright idea, we don’t know if it really works. It badly needs a few demonstrations where we can say, “Look, this can crack certain problems”.

Cotton is is cultivated in just about 5–6% of our total land. But it guzzles an enormous amount of pesticides and fungicides disproportionate to that. To build belief in Vrikshayurveda, we need to be challenged with problems to which we can actually offer solutions. There are certain high-value crops — plantation crops, spices, things with high market value — where Vrikshayurveda can make an intervention and show some success that may draw attention to it.

Seed health is very important. If you can concentrate quite a bit on seed health for key and important crops, that has an impact all the way to the harvest stage. It makes the plant more robust, less prone to disease attack, less prone to pests, gives it intrinsic vitality.

The second is soil fertility . Aristotle once said that soil is the stomach of the plant. There are many lines of thinking available in Vrikshayurveda, starting from how do you prepare the soil over a period of time and in medium and short terms how we can enrich the soil.

Third, Ayurveda has the idea of Rasayana, a rejuvenator that can help improve the quantity and quality of so many tissues in the body and really boost general health.

The Rasayana approach to plant crops is something that should be seriously examined. And in the case of Vrikshayurveda, unlike Ayurveda, we have the great advantage that the kinds of experiments you perform can be very varied — you are treating plants. The ethical considerations for constituting a trial group are correspondingly so much easier. We also have an entire hundred-plus years of an Ayurvedic industry dealing with plants and processes of preparation that we can build upon.

Venky: This is also a point I want to bring in — it is a bit of a double bind. Today, a lot of people are productizing live microbial solutions. I remember a very funny incident where I was at a stall for a biological product and they were selling this microbial solution. A farmer comes in and quietly asks: this is a microbial solution? Yes, yes. Then the farmer asks: if it is a microbial solution, it is live — how can it be bottled? It is a question that often trips up modern-day approaches, because today, whether we like it or not, farmers have become in some sense habituated to traditional solutions that promise very quick results and are easy to handle. It always seems like the effort is higher with alternatives. How do we lower that effort, while not compromising on the principles?

Dr. AVB: “I think that is a very fair point. A century ago, within a traditional rural lifestyle, it might not have been such a big challenge to say: prepare this over a period of days, dilute it, and spray it. It is much like Kalamkari painting, where the dye takes a full 30-day process to mature. But once it is finished, the result is fantastic. I have a beautiful Kalamkari painting in my living room that has been exposed to sunlight—sometimes diffuse, sometimes bright—for about fourteen years now, and it has not faded. The color deepens like wine maturing in secondary fermentation. It is a slow, deliberate process.

But we must recognize that lifestyles have fundamentally changed. A hundred years back, people hand-pounded millets; today, nobody does that. On the one hand, there has to be user-friendliness at the farm level today. On the other hand, we must also realize that the ‘easy access’ of modern technological solutions has only been made possible by enormous state investments in backbone systems and infrastructure.”

Today, if you move just 50 kilometers outside Chennai, a plastic pot is somehow more viable than a traditional mud pot. How can this be? For a mud pot, the raw materials, the skills, and the tradition are all locally available. For a plastic pot, the feedstock comes from a refinery that might be thousands of miles away. It only seems more viable because the government has invested tens of thousands of crores into the necessary infrastructure—transport networks, refineries, and roads. If you question this disparity, people often ask, 'Are you trying to stop all progress?' We are not trying to stop progress. But we must recognize that a specific development paradigm has made certain technologies artificially viable while making others enormously less so.

Instead of waiting for the day when the state finally reinvests heavily in Vrikshayurveda, we have to get started ourselves. We must take those initial baby steps to prove that this is a viable path for development. We already have the foundational strength and experience to take those steps right now."

Venky: There are a lot of modern entrepreneurs who are willing to experiment. Agriculture universities are increasingly becoming privately owned. Kaveri Seeds launched their own Kaveri University with an ex-VC coming from the government institutions. I think there is a lot of emphasis on what kind of private research can be done, which is slightly more market-focused but can easily be taken to market and tested.

What are some of the immediate low-hanging fruit that someone could try out, that could be of good help for somebody who wants to get started?

Dr. AVB: Storage forms of biopesticides are promising. Seed treatments are another major opportunity. The advantage is that many of these approaches are transferable across crops and ecological contexts. We have an enormous database of knowledge, both in the textual literature and in the people’s knowledge.

Seed health has a lot of potential. If you have seeds with good health and vitality, it can result in crops that are much more healthy, getting better yield, much less susceptible to pests and diseases. We have done preliminary work with fumigation and treatment of seeds. It has been very promising. We are exploring how these treatments can have a prolonged shelf life.

Rasayana approach of Ayurveda for plants and plant health has tremendous value. Some of these special substances — people have spoken of major rasayanas for sharpening intellect or buddhi, and there are other kinds of rasayana that may be helping in various other types of functions. You can challenge the idea of Rasayana with the problems you have to solve in Vrikshayurveda.

Some of this knowledge is already widespread in our people. It is dormant. I don’t think it has been destroyed or done away with. A lot of it is dormant and capable of springing up in an atmosphere where people are willing to look at it, willing to think about it, and you are not going to be ridiculed just because you are voicing or talking about it.

There is also an enormous amount of data lying around. The Honey Bee magazine published by Anil Gupta over the last 30 years has humongous amounts of data drawing on farmers’ experiences from various parts of India. There are a whole lot of prescriptions, descriptions, and texts of Vrikshayurveda.

Several years back, I made a feeble attempt — which I couldn’t complete — to set up what in those days we called an expert system to capture all this data. Today, with the type of tools we have with artificial intelligence and LLMs, there are lots of possibilities. Supposing somebody comes and asks about a yellow hairy caterpillar problem on rice, if I don’t have anything readily available for that specifically, as a human being I’d say, “Maybe I have something that is somewhat close in terms of its habitat, behavior, or appearance”. Or I have something for yellow hairy caterpillar, but for some other crop that bears some resemblance?. Today, an LLM can be programmed to do this kind of analogical reasoning.

There is also so much in Vrikshayurveda about weather predictions — short-term, medium-term, long-term — how to use plants, how to use insects, how to use meteorological phenomena. Recently there is a new term doing the rounds called ethno meteorology.

Benjamin Orlove and his colleagues from the University of Rochester were looking at some peculiar traditions in the Peruvian Andes. Every season, the elders take a look at the stars, make some calculations, and tell the farmers whether they can plant in the normal season or there has to be some change. He published a Nature paper showing that this is a folk method by which they are able to figure out whether it is going to be an El Niño year.

More than thirty years back, I visited the Karjat tribal area in Maharashtra. In a heavy rainfall season, some surrounding communities had planted and lost a lot of the rice crop. But the tribal community I spoke to said: our elders could foresee that this was going to be a heavy rainfall season, so we were prepared. I said: how could they foresee it? They said: no single indication is entirely decisive, but you have to look at a collection of indications. Every season before rain, you observe where the birds make their nests. Are the crows making their nest in the dense foliage close to the trunk, or in the thinner foliage farther away from the trunk? That is one indication. A set of indications like this, put together and synthesized with a yukti gives you an idea of what is going to happen.

Venky: I have heard this from other farmers too on where the nests are made. When owls are spotted in a farm, I’ve heard farmers correlate it with the level of soil fertility. There’s a UK-based company called Chirrup which has made small monitors that record biodiversity sounds, bird sounds in a particular farm. They make an estimate of the ecological health of the farm. A lot of modern approaches can be interlinked with some of these traditional approaches. And especially the meteorological aspect — a lot of algorithms can be built around these. Are there other plant indicators that people have tested?

Dr. AVB: There are examples from Gujarat. If a particular plant flowers in a particular season, that is a signal as to whether the onset of monsoon is going to be normal, or whether there is going to be a change.

When we look at all of this, we need to look at it with an open mind but also non-judgmentally. Though we belong to the same culture, much of our system of upbringing and education have alienated many of us from the way things are done in our own tradition.

Very often there is this idea that people were secretive, didn’t share things, a lot of knowledge decayed because people didn’t even teach it to their children. What we actually see is that one of the underlying factors in many people who hold traditional knowledge — in Vaithyam and so many other things — is that they have moral considerations about who they will and will not teach it to. Whether that person deserves it or not.

I know some people who say: I have this powerful medicine for jaundice. I am not going to teach it to my son. That fellow is commercially minded — he will only use it for making money. I once got into an interesting discussion and challenged this person: if you teach it to nobody, this knowledge will die with you. And I found the most astounding answer.

This idea that a human being is the sole repository and carrier of knowledge — that knowledge dies with him and is born with him — is the height of arrogance.

If a human being needs a piece of knowledge, the Great Spirit holds that knowledge, and it will come and descend upon them. It is a strong moral position. There can be no logical argument against it. It is the height of arrogance to say that I generate knowledge.

This is also manifest in a very interesting experience we had more than twenty-five years ago. As part of a study commissioned to look at how some traditional Ayurveda industries are working, some excellent MBA people analyzed one successful Ayurvedic company. They said that they are doing very well, quality of products is fine, but their product mix is wrong. If you look at your total income, about 50% of your preparation gives you 70% of your profits. You should cut out about twenty-five of these preparations and you will be much more profitable.

So this family looked at what they wanted eliminated. The products the MBA team wanted eliminated was a medicine called Karna Bindu, an ear drop; a tooth preparation; niche formulations for a small range of conditions — these are products where hardly one person in many would come to a vaidya with that complaint.

But the family said that we are not here just to make a profit. It is our dharma, responsibility to give a complete portfolio of medicines that a vaidya can use in practice. If I cut those preparations in the name of maximizing business, the vaidyas who are dependent on me are deprived of those products — and that is not right.

What would a modern corporate say? You have shareholders to answer to, maximize profit, do your 2% CSR. There is a deep moral consideration here. Traditional teaching is often not transactional — you pay me, I teach you. It is relational. You establish a relationship, assess whether the person is suitable, whether they are responsible, and then you teach.

We can create dharmic structures that respect where each one is coming from. There are entrepreneurs in the community I steward who are looking at these questions with respect and reverence. I am trying to see in what ways this can be taken forward. I come with that conviction because there are people who are actually looking at this and trying to create artha, rooted in dharma.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Dear Friends,

Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?

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Subscriber-only Post Trailers

Pluckk Vs KisaanSay: A Study in Contrasts

Both focus on farm-to-door. Both raised capital recently. Both have similar growth trajectories. And yet their DNA is as divergent as it could get.

Two Indian food startups both raised funding in the same week of April 2026.
One raised ₹100 crore and wants to sell cold-pressed juice in UAE. The other raised ₹34 crore and wants to put Kalanamak rice from UP and Chambal ghee from Madhya Pradesh on Delhi living room shelves — with the farmer collective's name on the packet.

Pluckk is in perishables — tomatoes, broccoli, avocado, pre-cut salads. These require cold chain, dark store proximity, 24-hour sell-through, and continuous replenishment logistics. Every unit of revenue comes with high wastage risk and time-sensitive delivery cost.

KisaanSay is in shelf-stable staples — rice, ghee, atta, spices, dry fruits, honey, jaggery, cold-pressed oil. These products have months of shelf life, require no cold chain, tolerate longer delivery windows, and can be sold through any channel without a Blinkit partnership. FWIW. KisaanSay did partner with Blinkit recently for their staples

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishidotsystem

P.S. After I wrote this, I received an interesting comment that implored me to compare Pluckk, Kisaansay with Noice.

Noice operates as a quick-commerce private label incubated within the Swiggy ecosystem. It focuses heavily on fast-moving, high-margin consumer categories like cold-pressed juices (such as mango, ABC, and sugarcane) and frozen foods. Although quick commerce doesn’t do fresh food well, there are interesting possibilities that leverage quick-commerce data to identify and fulfill urban demand for convenience and impulse purchases.

Why Are Indian Seed Growers Leaving?

The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade.

What are the six archetypes of seed growers in India? What can be done to reverse this trend ? I explore four options viz., 1) Complete managed farming operations. 2) Leveraging genetics. 3) Partial mechanisation 4) Newer areas for seed production. One of these options is also part of the problem.

These are challenging times for seed growers in India. The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade.

The government is simultaneously subsidizing both sides of this problem.

In my home state, Oil palm has taken over seed production at large.
Under NMEO-OP, the National Mission on Edible Oils — Oil Palm, farmers in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka receive a capital subsidy, a drip irrigation subsidy, and a government Fair and Remunerative Price that is announced before planting and guaranteed by the state.

This is a genuinely generous package, and it is working — oil palm acreage is growing.

The same government, through a different department, is expressing concern about grower exit from seed production and calling for better field officer coverage.

Of course, the 'seed production farmer' is not a monolithic identity in India. The tomato seed grower in Haveri, Karnataka, the cotton seed grower in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, and the bajra seed grower in Barmer, Rajasthan, operate under fundamentally different agronomic, economic, and social conditions.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of KrishidotSystem.

P.S. Ravi Kumar Tomar made an interesting comment.

“All problems mentioned in last column does exist but Seed Production Industry as a whole is not declining in India. It’s just that farmers choose to go for Oil Palm due to ease & long term security BUT seed production acreages keep growing. Just the cluster shifts to some other location. There is a consolidation of such growers too via professional Seed Production companies”

Missing Middle in Agri-Mechanisation Landscape

If you look at India’s mechanisation landscape, there is a missing middle no one seems to be talking about. When I triage the price points and capabilities, the following tiers are emerging.

Lowest Tier:
Single-purpose walking machines, suitable for inter-row work in vegetable plots or orchards, start at 36 K INR (~390 USD) and could go all the way upto 1.65L INR (~1769 USD). These have constraints in terms of walking operator and 2-5 implements.

Second Tier:

Power tillers in India start from around ₹1.65 lakh, with VST Shakti models pricing at ₹2.04 lakh and Kirloskar models running ₹2-3 lakh. These are also walking type. There are no power take-off system for most implements.

Missing Middle:
The missing middle exists at ₹2.5L – ₹3.75L tier (~2681 to 4027 USD). Those in which the operator is seated + 4WD + heavy tillage + multi-implement.

Products exist in this price band, but all current offerings sacrifice at least two critical capabilities.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishidotsystem

P.S. Bhushan Darekar shared how his product thesis aligns with the missing middle in agri-mechanisation landscape. He also shared their roadmap with price point evolving from Robot as a Service to direct selling.

“Today’s options either a) Depend heavily on human physical effort (walking machines), or b) Are too large, expensive, and not suited for inter-row operations (tractors).

We are still converting human biological energy into farm work, often under harsh conditions (chemical exposure, fatigue, labor shortage). In many ways, this is unsustainable — both economically and from a health perspective. We are building the Farm Guardian Rover — a multi-utility, electric, compact, and semi-autonomous field robot designed specifically for horticulture:

A) Separates the operator from the machine (remote + autonomous operation)

B) Works in narrow rows and tough field conditions

C) Supports multiple farm operations (spraying, interculture, etc.)

D) Designed at a practical price point for Indian farmers and service providers

Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet

I am gearing up for Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet on 2nd June in collaboration with NewGen IEDC – Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Centre, University of Kashmir.

Despite the conflict this region has witnessed over decades, Agriculture has been the most resilient sector in this region for three reasons.

1) Altitude
Kashmiri saffron grows at 1,600 to 1,800 meters above sea level in the Karewa highlands between the Pir Panjal and Great Himalayan ranges. This altitude produces the specific combination of temperature differential, soil drainage, and UV exposure that gives the stigma its biochemical profile: higher crocin (coloring strength), higher safranal (flavor), higher picrocrocin (bitterness). These are the three parameters by which saffron is graded internationally. Kashmir maximizes all three.

2) Terroir
Kashmiri apples taste the way they do because the Karewa soil, the valley's night-day temperature differential, and the high-altitude sunlight angle are an unreproducible combination.

3) Tradition
J&K holds nine GI-tagged products: saffron, Pashmina, Kani shawl, walnut wood carving, sozani craft, papier-mache, hand-knotted carpet, Khatamband, and Basmati.

Besides, entrepreneurs and farmers joining us from Kashmir - Ashfaq Syed, Irshad Ahmad Dhar, we have a motley crew of entrepreneurs joining us from various parts of India

Jagadeesh Sunkad
Partha Chakraborty
Padma Satyamurthy
Ashok Banerjee
Jofi Joseph
Milan M.
Komal Jaiswal
How can we accelerate agripreneurship in Kashmir? How do we integrate Kashmiri agripreneur ecosystem with India's agripreneurial ecosystem? Why do I host Agripreneur Meets?

My life time goal is to build a mycorrhizal network of changemakers working on transforming food and agriculture systems. There is no agenda other than learning and understanding what different change makers are working on, wearing a variety of hats, whether through finance, entrepreneurship or culture.

If you are an agripreneur from Kashmir, do fill the interest form so that we can bring the right set of entrepreneurs in the room.

Food System Transformers

Besides my passion for food and agriculture, I have a long standing love affair with the Indian epic Mahabharata.

In my earlier life, I wore a colourful storyteller career hat that profited handsomely from leveraging Mahabharata as a story technology kaleidoscope and today, a large part of my leadership coaching owes its existence to the frameworks that are built on Mahabharata.

With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.

My relationship with Mahabharata transformed when my Yoga Mentor showcased how the epic could be a powerful mirror of self-discovery.

Essentially speaking, you can read Mahabharata in three ways
1) Historical Text 2) Inspiration 3) A Mirror to Discover Your Self.

The first two are outside-in ways of reading Mahabharata, and the third is inside-out.

How do you leverage Mahabharata as an inside-out mirror to discover yourself? As my Yoga Mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan elaborates in his fascinating book, Five Seats of Power, Mahabharata explores five archetypal seats of power viz.,

1) Yudhishtra: Structure and Order

2) Bhima: Adventure and Sensitivity

3) Nakula: Service and Compassion

4) Sahadeva: Knowledge and Inquiry

5) Arjuna: Integration and Simultaneity

It’s fascinating when I apply these five archetypes in the context of food systems.

More in a recent edition of Krishidotsystem.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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State of Agritech - 14th May 2026

1/ FMC India’s $252 million distress sale to Crystal Crop Protection

Soon after shutting down its India Operations, FMC finds a pre-IPO suitor, albeit with a divergent cultural DNA. What led to this distress sale? What does Crystal Crop Protection gain? What does FMC gain? What is the road ahead?

2/ When Climate-Resilient Crop becomes the most Climate-Vulnerable Crop

A new study covering 51 years and 563 districts has just published the most rigorous estimate yet of what climate change is doing to Indian agriculture. Which crop lost the most yield to a 1°C rise in temperature? Not rice, wheat or maize. Pearl millet.

3/ Double-clicking on Amazon’s $30 million deal to buy carbon credits from Indian rice farmers

Amazon bought $30 million worth of Indian carbon credits without using India’s carbon market. Why are Indian farmers not a counterparty to this deal? What about additionality paradox? Can it be resolved?

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

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A male farmer might though. There are enough datasets to show how men are terse while engaging with the AI advisory systems. 

She says, “My tomato has black spots, I have been spraying, I have been tilling, I have been removing the weeds, I have been doing everything I know to do, so why is this still happening?” She has already run her own field experiments before the advisor walks up. She is asking for the next intervention, not the first.

When women in Indian smallholder collectives engage with agricultural advisory systems, they arrive as field researchers with diagnostic intuition built from years of soil contact and a working notebook of attempted interventions.

Every agricultural AI product currently being marketed at them is built for a user who describes a symptom and waits for a prescription. That user does not exist on these farms.

In vast majority of Indian farms, the woman runs the field while the man runs the purchase order. What happens when the entire agricultural AI sector has built its product line for the buyer and not the executer?

This and several more questions surfaced during my second edition of “AI in Ag Podcast”.

This behavioural insight was surfaced in beautiful detail by Preethy Iyer who joined us to share the AI engine she has been building for women farmer collectives at Kai Thota. She was joined by Rhishi Pethe, a dear friend and senior advisor at the Gates Foundation, and Sheriff Babu, who runs an agent-swarm system on WhatsApp for Indian farmers.

India's agricultural AI sector is now large enough to attract serious capital and serious policy attention. Sovereign dialect models, smallholder advisory tools, autonomous implements, voice agents, WhatsApp bots, are all being built simultaneously, often with foundation or government money or private venture capital, depending on its public or private orientation.

The metric that gates whether these investments continue is the wicked question of impact. If the metric is broken, the entire allocation is broken.

The dominant story in agricultural AI today is that the limit is technology. Better models, better data, faster inference, cheaper compute, more dialects, and the smallholder advisory problem is solved.

That story falls apart at the first field visit.

Preethy described arriving in Kai Thota with a textbook ag-tech stack: sensors, soil-data collection, a recommendation engine for what to grow. The women collectives she works with looked at it and said “we don’t need it. We touch the soil, we know.”

They had years of context on which the textbook stack had nothing to add. What they did not know was how the city worked, what the urban subscriber wanted, what the market would absorb next month.

The bottleneck was knowledge of the city, not the land.

This inversion shows up across the entire conversation. Sheriff, building from the other end, found that grape farmers reporting yellow patches were universally being told by general models that they had a disease. None of the models identified the much commoner cause, zinc deficiency. Rhishi described a “barbell distribution” of adopters in the sector: a cluster of early enthusiasts and a much larger cohort still asking where to begin, what the ROI is, whether this is just the last decade of agritech disappointment in a new wrapper.

We are in 2026 and the median Indian agritech buyer has not budged.

Now consider how impact gets measured.

A funder wants to know whether its capital is producing better outcomes for smallholders. The cleanest signal is product purchase data. Did the farmer buy the recommended input? Did the seller move volume? Did the advisory tool drive a transaction?

Then ask who, inside an Indian smallholder household, actually executes a purchase.

Preethy described this pattern with absolute specificity. Men make the visible strategic decisions: what to plant, what to spray, what to buy. Men also run the EMI payments on the phone and the bike. Women weed, sow, harvest, run the home, take backpack sprayers into the field, and crucially, take the loans that fund the men’s EMIs.

Men buy whatever the sales pitch recommends, frequently while drunk, frequently because a subsidy exists, frequently with no view on whether the product helps.

This means the purchase-data layer is measuring decisions made by people who are not in the field. The yield-data layer, which arrives two or three years later, is too lagging to course-correct any specific advisory product. The intermediate layer that would actually measure whether the right person in the household received useful advice does not exist in most reporting frameworks.

When the metric counts the husband, the industry builds for the husband.

A Coimbatore startup recently launched a battery-powered weeder for Indian smallholder farms where the operator works it with a joystick, from a distance, never bending down

Watch a woman weed her plot and you can see whom the product was actually drawn up for. She squats, pulls the deep-rooted grass by hand, and composts it, because the grass becomes the nutrient that feeds the next crop. She has already optimized the system. The weeder is solving a problem she does not have.

A different startup brought a lightweight battery-powered weeder to the same collective and asked the women to evaluate it. They tested it, found that walking with it shifted the battery weight in a way that made the weeds fly rather than separate, and handed it back. Their feedback was technically precise and product-killing. They were never the customer the company had imagined.

The misallocation does not stop at the product layer. It runs all the way down to the language layer that every Indian agritech company is currently rebuilding privately.

India has, through Bhashini and several other initiatives at IIT Madras, built some of the most ambitious linguistic public infrastructure of any government in the world. Thousands of hours of emotionally tagged training data across Indian languages, transcribed and verified. Meanwhile, every agricultural AI company is rebuilding its own private dialect corpus and calling it a moat.

The vocabulary of Indian farming changes every 150 kilometres.

A wild berry called sundakkai in a Tamil village becomes chikka badne kai in a Kannada village two hours away. A berry has been reclassified as a brinjal. No general-purpose LLM resolves this, because the data is local, oral, and not on the internet.

The country has the public infrastructure to solve this for everyone as a commons. The industry is solving it a thousand times in parallel.

Preethy wants a thousand Kai Thotas, each focused on its local context, all running on shared public infrastructure. Sheriff estimates the one-time public investment to build a serviceable Indian agricultural foundation model at ₹150 to ₹200 crore.

There is one technical question whose answer reshapes the entire investment case, and the panel disagreed on it openly.

Will general-purpose frontier models eventually absorb enough agricultural context that smallholder advisory becomes a feature inside a horizontal product like Gemini or Claude?

Rhishi assigns this some non-trivial probability over the next five years. His position is that even granting the possibility, the right move is to build for today’s farmer with today’s tools, because waiting is a moral failure when a million advisory conversations can be improved right now.

Sheriff assigns the probability close to zero. He has attempted distilling the agricultural portion of a frontier model and found nothing to distill. His argument is architectural. The transformer’s pretraining diet does not contain the kind of contextual diagnostic reasoning that distinguishes a zinc-deficient grape leaf from a fungal one, and the architecture cannot manufacture that reasoning out of general text on the internet.

If Rhishi is right, every rupee spent on sovereign Indian agricultural models is a depreciating asset waiting to be obsoleted by the next frontier release. If Sheriff is right, every rupee spent waiting for ChatGPT to figure out Indian smallholders is wasted runway, and Indian capital should be deploying into Indian models today.

We do not yet have enough evidence either way. The entire capital stack of Indian agricultural AI for the next decade rides on which of the two views turns out to be correct.

What follows from all of this is a short list of moves that should be obvious by now.

Foundations and Impact funders should retire product-purchase data as a primary impact metric for smallholder agricultural AI. The metric is reading the wrong household member. Replace it with measured reach to women specifically, measured trust, feasibility of acting on the advice given, and observed capability to act on it. These metrics are harder to collect, produce smaller dashboards, and correspond to the actual farm.

Treat the Indian agricultural dialect corpus as Digital Public Infrastructure.

Fund the Bhashini-equivalent for agriculture as a one-time public good. End the parallel private rebuild and free a hundred companies to compete on what they should be competing on, which is the quality of advice and the trust of the woman in the field.

Stop designing implements for the operator who is not present. The next weeder, sprayer, or harvester that enters an Indian smallholder farm should be co-designed with women operators in the room, walking with the prototype, holding the load, and rejecting it freely when the battery placement is wrong.

What three very different practitioners converged on was the same finding, rendered three ways: the models are not the bottleneck; the way we count impact, the household member we count it through, and the feedback we let into the next iteration are.

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I am finally back home after completing the ‘Shifting Cultures’ Module of my MSL Systems Retreat at Melbourne. I hosted a small Agripreneurs Meet at Melbourne; met incredible changemakers working on education and agriculture in India, while working their way to raise capital in Melbourne; traveled across the Great Ocean Drive and enjoyed the beautiful Victorian weather where it is sunny, raining and windy all at the same time. I had a beautiful experience interacting, learning and observing the fascinating forty changemakers from all parts of the globe.

My mind is still in a blur, metabolizing the diverse experiences I had during this retreat. I will be penning a long reflections note soon. Since I am in a liminal state, navigating the gap between where I was and where I am right now, I want to break the programming jinx with this self-reflective piece that explores the archetypes of transformers of food systems.

Love

Venky

Besides my passion for food and agriculture, I have a long standing love affair with the Indian epic Mahabharata.

In my earlier life, I wore a colourful storyteller career hat that profited handsomely from leveraging Mahabharata as a story technology kaleidoscope and today, a large part of my leadership coaching owes its existence to the frameworks that are built on Mahabharata.

With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.

My relationship with Mahabharata transformed when my Yoga Mentor showcased how the epic could be a powerful mirror of self-discovery.

Essentially speaking, you can read Mahabharata in three ways
1) Historical Text 2) Inspiration 3) A Mirror to Discover Your Self.

The first two are outside-in ways of reading Mahabharata, and the third is inside-out.

How do you leverage Mahabharata as an inside-out mirror to discover yourself? As my Yoga Mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan elaborates in his fascinating book, Five Seats of Power, Mahabharata explores five archetypal seats of power viz.,

1) Yudhishtra: Structure and Order
2) Bhima: Adventure and Sensitivity
3) Nakula: Service and Compassion
4) Sahadeva: Knowledge and Inquiry
5) Arjuna: Integration and Simultaneity

It’s fascinating when I apply these five archetypes in the context of food systems.

Yudhishtras (Aeneas if you want to draw parallels with Roman heroes) are the administrators bound by the norms. They are most often interfacing with Sarkar (Federal Government) engines, those who believe in the power of policy to create change.

The MSP commission designer, the FSSAI standards setter, the state agriculture department officer who drafts a natural farming policy are typical Yudhishtras. Their shadow emerges when they starts worshipping the book of shoulds over the reality that is emergent. Yudhishtra becomes Bhishma (”The Man with Terrible Vow”) who gets caught with rigidity and role-boundedness

The Bhima (Hercules if you want to draw parallels) of food systems is the high-energy agripreneur who goes first into difficult terrain. The founder who built a new market category long before anyone believed a market existed.

Bhima energy is what the entrepreneurs thrive on. Their shadow emerges when the bhima disrupts without understanding if the ecosystem really warranted disruption in the first place. Bhima becomes Duryodhana (who forgets that he was once Suyodhana) who is caught up in impulsivity

The Nakulas (The Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux,if you want to draw parallels) are self-less servants who work on grass roots and serve change makers on the ground. They are the healers and do the thankless job of holding the infrastructure that no one pays attention until it gets broken.

The cooperative secretary everyone trusts. The extension worker with a 20-year relationship across five villages. Nakulas serve and often place others needs before theirs. Their shadow emerges when they get burned out since they hadn't paid attention to their needs. Nakula becomes Gandhari who in his/her eagerness to offer, forgets to replenish himself/herself

The Sahadeva (Cassandra if you want to draw parallels) of Food System believe in data and theories. They need a working theory before working on the ground. They are the researchers who believe in the power of numbers and can predict what will happen. Sahadeva was also an astrologer.

Sahadevas predict the collapse of Central Gangetic plans, when a particular bioregion will run out of groundwater. Their shadows emerge when they are unwilling to take action on the knowledge they sit on. They are unwilling to take the risk and endlessly wait for the opportune moment when they feel ready to take action. Sahadeva becomes Sakuni who gets caught in intellectualism and forgets to deploy insight in a dharmic manner

Arjunas (Odysseus if you want to draw parallels) in the food systems are a rare species. The one who stands between the two armies examines the double bind inherent in every difficult choice.

The blended finance architect who won't let investor return logic erase farmer dignity. The researcher who won't publish a study that flattens complexity to serve a policy narrative.

Arjuna's dharma sankata (double-bind) in the food system is live and unresolved: Does chemical-free transition serve farmers if it reduces income in the short term? Their shadows emerge when they sit on double binds long enough and unwilling to pay the consequences of their decisions. Arjuna becomes Karna who fails to tap into his heroic potential.

Today, the food systems are collapsing by their own weight, thanks to Climate change and therefore there is "dharmic" fight to restore dharma of food systems. Which Pandava role do you play in food systems? Can Pandavas collaborate to solve food system challenges? These questions are powerful enough to wake up every day and do the work I do. :)

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So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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I send personal updates when I embark on new projects. Not out of vanity to play status games. But out of the humbling realization that in systems change work, especially while dealing with those that lovingly pushes me out of my comfort zone, tapping the collective wisdom is the often the hardest part.

Trust Margaret J. Wheatly to beautifully explicate this:

Since the three dimensions of my work - Content, Community Building (Retreats and Meetups) and Consulting- are dedicated to build the underlying mycorrhizal networks that can potentially tap into this collective wisdom for food systems transformation, it is fascinating to watch my informal work become formal over a span of six years.

1. Catalyst in Residence

I have signed up as “Catalyst In Residence” for accelerating regenerative agripreneurship in India with CEEW, supported by Rainmatter Foundation, through their Green Economy Accelerator.

Since a large part of my ecosystem engineering work has largely been open source-driven, I thought why not take this approach for this project as well.

Regenerative Agripreneurship in India is currently a niche affair, operating in counter currents with the current economic, policy, social ecosystems that favors conventional agriculture, locking us in a zero-sum game that neither benefits agribusinesses, farmers, consumers or the planet.

In India, out of 93 Million farmers (based on 2019-20 census), we have around 5-6% of Indian farmers who practice regenerative farming. Of course, I take every public number in India with a heavy dose of salt, at the risk of straining my cardiovascular system.

The question is: How do we accelerate regenerative agripreneurship in India?

Given my strengths and what the ecosystem sorely lacks, I am breaking down my intervention into three levers viz.,

1. Entrepreneurship:

   Build entrepreneurial collectives that bring together Civil Society Organisations driving regenerative Agripreneurship on grassroots and Entrepreneurs with strong unit-economics acumen to build deeper market linkages and create further cascading effects with entrepreneurs incubating regen-market clusters that require hand-holding support to build market-ready regen commodity ecosystems.

2. Finance:

   Build hybridized financial models that can be sequenced according to the payoff and risk-return and built into financial products that can help farmers transition towards regenerative agriculture.

3. Culture

   Focus on farmer dignity, shame of pursuing “ancient” (as opposed to “progressive”)agriculture and build collectives of religious/spiritual organisations that use their narrative juggernaut to help farmers with transitioning towards regenerative farming.

I have consciously kept Policy (Policy is still a black box for me and I feel its wasteful investment to work on something where you have less control over outcomes) and Production Systems (Who am I to tell farmers/growers how to transition towards regen? I am happy being enabler catalyst) out of this framework.

The most recent Bhopal Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat was a first step in building this mycorrhizal layer.

With the help of friends, I plan to run regen-specific incubation programs, design workshops that unlock the challenges in cracking transition financing and bring together diverse religious/spiritual organisations that are involved in regenerative transition.

What would be the collective outcome of these activities?

I plan to come up with few specific investment proposals that can be taken to funders who would be willing to address Agritech - Development Death Cycle

I sketched this image several moons ago to talk about Development-Death cycle and strangely enough, it refuses to become irrelevant. Can we attract capital towards systemic investments that does the hard job of market creation and address infrastructure gap that inhibits regenerative agriculture’s highest potential?

I will find out. :)

2. Melbourne Agripreneurs Meetup

I'm coming to Melbourne for the in-person retreat module of the Small Giants Academy's amazing Mastery in Systems Leadership Retreat. I would love to meet agripreneurs/agritech entrepreneurs/investors/regen farmers in town. I am especially excited to meet Beanstalk Agtech folks and Tenacious ventures folks and folks working on food systems in Regen Melbourne ecosystem.

Why do I host Agripreneur Meetups?

My life time goal is to build a mycorrhizal network of changemakers working on transforming food and agriculture systems. There is no agenda other than learning and understanding what different change makers are working on, wearing a variety of hats, whether through finance, entrepreneurship or culture.

If you are from Melbourne or know someone doing interesting work in food systems there, you can share this RSVP link with them. I will be grateful

Dates: 28th April 2026

Time: 530 - 730 PM AEDT

3. Kashmir Agripreneurs Meetup

I am planning my first Agripreneurs Meet in Srinagar on the first week of June. Despite the conflict this region has witnessed over decades, Agriculture has been the most resilient sector in this region for three reasons.

1) Altitude
Kashmiri saffron grows at 1,600 to 1,800 meters above sea level in the Karewa highlands between the Pir Panjal and Great Himalayan ranges. This altitude produces the specific combination of temperature differential, soil drainage, and UV exposure that gives the stigma its biochemical profile: higher crocin (coloring strength), higher safranal (flavor), higher picrocrocin (bitterness). These are the three parameters by which saffron is graded internationally. Kashmir maximizes all three.

2) Terroir
Kashmiri apples taste the way they do because the Karewa soil, the valley's night-day temperature differential, and the high-altitude sunlight angle are an unreproducible combination.

3) Tradition
J&K holds nine GI-tagged products: saffron, Pashmina, Kani shawl, walnut wood carving, sozani craft, papier-mache, hand-knotted carpet, Khatamband, and Basmati.

How can we accelerate agripreneurship in Kashmir? How do we integrate Kashmiri agripreneur ecosystem with India's agripreneurial ecosystem? Few agripreneurs are traveling with me to Srinagar. If you are interested in joining hands, and can help me reach out to many more founders from Kashmir, let me know. You can RSVP here

Date: 2nd June 2026

Time: 10 AM - 6 PM

Wish me good luck:) If you have suggestions that will help me reframe my “Catalyzing Regenerative Agripreneurship” thesis, I am all ears.

Cheers,

Venky

So, what do you think?

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State of Agritech - 14th April 2026

In Today’s Edition:

Programming Note: Happy Vishu and Tamizh New Year to my friends who are celebrating:)

1/ India’s Missing Middle in Mechanisation

If you triage the price points and capabilities in India’s mechanisation landscape, there is a missing middle no one seems to be talking about.

2/ Why Are Indian Seed Growers Leaving?

The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade. What are the six archetypes of seed growers in India? What can be done to reverse this trend ? I explore four options viz., 1) Complete managed farming operations. 2) Leveraging genetics. 3) Partial mechanisation 4) Newer areas for seed production. One of these options is also part of the problem.

3/ Pluckk Vs Kisaansay: A Study in Contrasts

Both focus on farm-to-door. Both raised capital recently. Both have similar growth trajectories. And yet their DNA is as divergent as it could get.

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

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If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

P.S. Supporting this work doesn’t have to come out of your pocket. If you read this as part of your professional development, you can use this email template to request reimbursement for your subscription.

Reflections from Bhopal Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat

The scent of contentment is intoxicating. It implores you to start afresh with a regenerative sense of vigour. I am starting the new financial year FY 26-27 with a deep sense of contentment as I plan what comes next after completing the Bhopal Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat.

Thanks to incredible local hospitality of Prateek Sharma, Vijay Dhole and Varun Chouhan and other friends, we had an incredible experience as the retreat unfolded with lots of love, joy, care and fun. It was filled with abundance and fragrance of the mahua (Indian Butter Tree Madhuca longifolia).that besotted us throughout the Satpura forests.

With friends joining us from various parts of India, Singapore and Dubai, we had forty four entre/intrapreneurs/ change-makers working across eight clusters viz., 1) Finance & Catalysts 2) Narrative Building 3) Policy and Research 4) Direct Farmer Commerce 5) Labour and Mechanisation 6) Agritech and Digital Ag 7) Bio-Inputs and Soil Science 8) Narrative Building

Unlike the previous editions, thanks to loving nudges of friends like Gurpriya and many others, we had better gender parity among the participants with 9 women changemakers joining us among 44 participants.

As you can see from the clusters, unlike the previous retreats, we made the definition of “Agripreneurs” fluid enough to bring together diverse, mutually dependent players working in regenerative transition.

Having done five retreats, we were confident during the planning phase to go beyond the Collective and Cooperative designs that have been attempted so far and try out collaborative structures with a vibrant group that had enough fuel of passion to appreciate the mutuality and interdependence instinctively from the abundant diversity in the room.

And so it warmed the cockles of my heart to watch this retreat become the Regenerative Social Hadron Collider that accelerated individual change makers to incredible energy levels, thanks to the passion and conviction each one was bringing from their lived experience to the room about regenerative pathways.

At one point, during the second day, the energy shift was palpable as spontaneous breakout sessions went on till 9 PM despite having a long day that started at 9 AM.

This energy owed a lot to the deep authenticity and vulnerability that emerged from sharing deeply personal stories of ethical dilemmas each of the participants have been holding in their breasts.

Among the various sessions we had organized, including a beautiful deepdive on Vrikshayurveda from CIKS Balu that forced agripreneurs to revisit their assumptions towards Indian Knowledge Systems, the one on “Ethical Dilemmas” is the closest to my heart. We ask an extremely personal question to every agripreneur in the room: What are your ethics? What are the most difficult ethical dilemmas you are sitting with ?

Thirty-odd dilemmas surfaced, each a live wire. Be a marketer or a farmer's friend. Follow the funder's agenda or the community's need. Hire people who execute or people who question. Stay small and stay true, or compromise a little and scale. Is data really objective ? Is it possible to institutionalize good work?

Should I be an apolitical entrepreneur or stay true to my political roots? Should I price my product based on the market realities or the real value I perceive in my bones? Should I take CSR funding or wait for the elusive patient capital? Should I stay true to my family and family business or break it down and become an entrepreneur in my own right? Should I focus on mechanisation or focus on livelihoods even when the work has copious amounts of drudgery? Should I give into pressures of the State or stay true to my ethics?

In conferences, especially with entrepreneurs in the room, people typically find ways to quickly resolve them. In a retreat like ours, we didn’t do that mistake here. We listened and sat. For listening intensely is sometimes more than enough.

There was one beautifully dilemma that I didn’t see coming though: What if the solutions we are envisioning for today become tomorrow's problem? And there was one that is definitely worth meditating deeper on.

Should I stay 100% committed to the perfect vision that is possible only at small scale right now ? Or should I compromise a bit and scale bigger? Most ecosystem conversations treat this as a sequencing question, as though deep conviction and scale are bed fellows. Anyone who has watched a regenerative enterprise navigate its fifth year knows that such hard questions have no other way other than to live through them.

Sometimes the willingness to sit with hard questions long enough is sufficient to change the people asking.

You see, at the end of the day, there is not much difference between agripreneurs and plants.

Both need sufficient nutrition to transform themselves. The trouble begins when we settle down with only one form of nutrition (VC capital, Incubator/Accelerator) and see everyone else as competitors.

Mitali and Saumya from Urbanfarms gave us a master class on Crop Nutrition 2.0 based on the emerging paradigm in soil science.

The first generation of crop nutrition thinking asked a very simple question. What is the plant missing and how do we deliver it directly?

Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium — ionic, water-soluble, immediately available. It worked spectacularly for a generation until physics and biology started protesting. A soil running on electrolytes alone eventually loses its ability to manage itself.

Mycorrhizal networks do something ionic delivery cannot: they route surplus from where it exists to where it is needed, across species lines, in response to signals the plant cannot even articulate.

Strangely enough, this session on Crop nutrition opened up a rabbit hole that transformed how I look at the entirety of my retreating business.

What if there could be another form of nutrition for agripreneurs beyond the conventional sources of nutrition? What could happen when we build mycorrhizal networks of agripreneurs who are willing to provide nutrition to fellow agripreneurs?

When we can let the plants choose the relationships it wants to build for nutrition and disease protection, thanks to a diverse and abundant and healthy microbial community in the soil, why not create a vibrant ecosystem for agripreneurs that lets them choose the relationships they want to build for their growth and prosperity?

It's funny.

It needed an independent solopreneur business to make the first real moves in building a vibrant community and a well-thriving ecosystem around Indian Agriculture.

Seeing the reflections from participants after the retreat (Ramesh, Manish, Prachur, Rahul, Pramel Gupta and Ashish Gupta) reaffirmed the deep conviction I have been pregnant with for a long time: Indian agripreneur ecosystem is hungry for a space with no agenda other than its highest possibility.

When I run the business of being independent (read as solopreneur business), I'm able to hold that container effortlessly without much strain. I am able to confidently state out that there is absolutely no other agenda here than the highest vision we could aspire to as a community.

It’s paradoxical and yet obvious when you mull over it. The smaller the organizational form, the larger the vision it can hold.

As a solopreneur, I have no board to answer to, no investor thesis to protect,
no particular business model to defend. No particular pet technologies to propagandize.

Being independent in these anxious times feels like a blessing — because independence at one level makes genuine interdependence possible at another.

So what next from here? I am getting ambitious.

1. I am doing an Agripreneurs Meetup in Melbourne later this month.

2. I am organizing a two-day Kashmir Agripreneurs Workshop on June 2nd and June 3rd this year with a bunch of agripreneurs traveling from various parts of India.

3. I am organizing a workshop with investing folks on making regen transition financing work in the month of June

4. I am organizing a special gathering of religious organisations working on regen transition in the month of July

5. I am planning the next Agripreneurs Retreat at Chandigarh on September 24-25-26-27

There are lots to do with the power of an ecosystem. It is now starting to feel easier to go after moonshot projects. Time now to dream bigger and chase goals that seem too daunting.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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And Agriculture?

Field extension manuals that nobody reads, public data that is brazenly manipulated based on the policy that is being professed, clueless machine-generated data sets that are blithely ignorant about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety1and an extension officer chain so thin that one officer covers a thousand farm households in better-served Indian states and far fewer in poorer ones.

The non-generalizable knowledge that actually runs farms is oral, local, deeply contextual and embodied.

A grower who grew up on her land knows where the water clogs after a heavy monsoon, which slopes drain fastest, what the mango orchard needs in its third year versus its seventh. An elephant visiting the farm in the elephant corridor has better prediction engines that tells him when the jackfruit is going to be ripe for illegal consumption. A grower knows that "jilli" in her dialect of Marathi refers to a caterpillar pest at a specific lifecycle stage on a cotton crop, and that the word means something different in a soybean context three districts away.

None of this is on the internet. None of it is in any training corpus. It was passed on, generation to generation, working and traversing the same land together, day in, day out.

This chain is now breaking in large parts of the world, whether in large holding contexts like US or smallholding contexts in India. The next generation does not want to farm. The knowledge is not being transferred.

“Can AI deliver better advice to farmers?” is not the important question. “What is the AI advice drawn from?” is.

When the knowledge that matters most was never digitized, what exactly is the model retrieving when a farmer asks it something?

Last week, I spoke with Two Desais, Sachi and Pratik to delve deep into these questions and more.

Sachi Desai has spent years at the intersection of large-scale precision agriculture and technology at Climate Corporation and Bayer. Pratik Desai is the Founder of KissanAI and Dhenu model. Both offered two complementary answers from their respective contexts that helped us go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Sachi comes from a world where the information gap is less about farmers not knowing things and more about farmers wanting confirmation before taking high-stakes decisions. A soy farmer in Illinois calls her advisor not because she is uninformed, but because farming is capital-intensive and irreversible, and talking through a decision is how she builds confidence to act.

Pratik comes from a world where neither the extension officer, nor the model is present in any meaningful way. When KissanAI trained the first version of Dhenu in 2023, they used approximately 1.5 million farmer conversations as training data because the way a smallholder farmer phrases an agricultural question is almost nothing like the way it appears in any text online. We are dealing with insane amount of context-gleaning skills here.

A generic large language model can only give a satisfactory answer to someone who does not know better. A farmer who knows cotton will immediately identify where the answer falls apart.

The model has not been trained on how farmers speak. It has been trained on how agronomists publish. Can you imagine how divergent the answers could get?

To discover the pathway of convergence, perhaps, its important to peel the business model layer that underpins these systems.

Both Sachi and Pratik operate on a B2B logic: AI advisory tools deployed to agribusinesses, input companies, and retailers who then surface them to farmers. The farmer interacts with an AI that has been configured, constrained, and calibrated by a business whose commercial interest is not identical to the farmer's.

I am turning on the paywall here as we get into the more juicy details.

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Why, after thirty centuries of farmers using neem, does India hold no position of leadership in neem research? Why, when a tribal community in Andhra Pradesh is using 420 species of medicinal plants with documented efficacy, does the nearest IIT estimate ten years and twenty lakhs INR (~21K USD) per plant per application to validate what farmers have already spent generations refining?

In my podcast with AV Balasubramanian (AVB), we explored many of these gnarly questions. AV Balasubramanian is one of the leading pioneers of deploying the wisdom of Vrikshayurveda in Indian Agriculture.

He is the co-founder of the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS) in Chennai, one, besides conserving 170+ traditional rice varieties, of the most serious institutional efforts to apply Vrikshayurveda -- the classical Indian science of plant health - to modern day challenges in sustainable agriculture.

His background is unusual even by the standards of people who do unusual things. A biochemistry and biophysics training at premier Indian institutions, a PhD abandoned in the US in 1982 in favour of a deep interest in exploring Science rooted in the Indian tradition, a decade as a student and teacher of Yoga at Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram under the direct lineage of T. Krishnamacharya and T.K.V. Desikachar, and eventually a decades-long collaboration with the Patriotic and People-Oriented Science and Technology (PPST) group, the intellectual collective that, more than any other, attempted to recover the epistemological foundations of Indian science rather than merely its recipes.

AVB could have made a career from positioning traditional knowledge as a cultural heritage to be preserved. He didn’t.

He has made a career of asking whether it works, under what conditions, for which problems, and how to scale it. His field team used a principle from Vrikshayurveda -- that bitter taste is an indicator of pesticidal potential -- to crack a fruit-and-shoot borer problem on brinjal that neem had failed to solve.

His experiments with Ayurvedic storage forms (arkas, thailas, arishtas) have demonstrated that shelf life -- the most commonly cited limitation of natural bioprotectants -- is a solvable problem, using technology the Ayurvedic drug industry has operated for over a century.

It’s unalloyed joy to hear when AVB speaks.

He speaks with scientific precision (while warning of the dangers of epistemic fascism) and carries his passion for Indian knowledge system with a scientist’s penchant for rigor. What made this conversation personal was not just the fact that he studied Yoga under the same lineage I have been studying since 2013. It was our shared love and passion for Indian Knowledge systems.

In the first part of this wide-ranging chat, AVB and I engage in philosophical throat clearing, exploring the context of Vrikshayurveda, before engaging with the the content of Vrikshayurveda.

I started off the dialogue with a fundamental question.

Traditional Indian medical and philosophical frameworks seem to rest on categories like vata, pitta, kapha that have not changed in millennia. A modern scientist looking at that would say: if your categories never change, is it really science?

In response, AVB shared a beautiful analogy he had read from Captain Srinivasa Murthy.

Imagine you make a list of every group that has tried to invade or conquer India over thirty centuries. You can list them in chronological order -- Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Portuguese, British, and so on. Or you can classify them differently: those who came by land, those who came by sea, those who came by air. The second classification not only subsumes everything that happened in the past but is capable of accommodating anything in the future.

An Ayurvedic physician examining a patient is doing exactly this. When he looks at a complex of symptoms and asks whether the primary doshic imbalance is vata, pitta, or kapha, he is using a classification scheme that exhausts the universe of discourse.

Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited transcript of the conversation for those who want to go into the greyness and nuance we explored. Always remember. The Map is not the Territory.

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Venky: You have explored an unusually wide range of subjects -- yoga, traditional metallurgy, water management, plant science -- yet your profile on the PPST website reveals a persistent interest in the epistemology of Indian knowledge systems. Before we get into the substance, I want to start personally. What was it like when you encountered this corpus of work?

AVB: I have to make this slightly biographical. Today I am being introduced as someone who made a journey into Vrikshayurveda and traditional knowledge. But I am as much a child of modernity as most others. I went to Kendriya Vidyalaya, studied biochemistry and biophysics, spent time at premier institutions, and was a PhD student in the US when I felt a craving to look at science and technology more rooted in Indian tradition. I didn’t even have the terminology “Indian knowledge systems” at that point.

I was a student in the US when I felt this craving. Having rather ingloriously abandoned a PhD in 1982, I made my journey back to Chennai. My basic training being in biophysics, I thought the nearest I could look at in terms of Indian knowledge systems was medicine or Ayurveda. But formally studying Ayurveda seemed a formidable six-to-seven-and-a-half-year course. Yoga seemed much less structured, more informal, not regularised. I first became a student and a teacher at Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram.

What struck me most forcefully was this patriarchal figure, Krishnamacharya himself, 90-plus years old. I always felt that when people talked about what great people India had two or three thousand years back, most of it was exaggerated. People who fought twenty thousand people, people who had brahmastra and all that. But it really blew my mind -- at the age of 93 or 94, I could see Krishnamacharya sitting in Mandaveli in Chennai, ram-rod erect. His memory was crystal clear, his recollection far better than mine.

We would start classes with him, both of us sitting ram-rod stiff. By about thirty to forty minutes we would be drooping and stooping. After one and a half hours he would still be fit as ever. Even if he resumed classes after three weeks, he would not be confused about where we stopped. He would know exactly where to start without any reference note. I said to myself: I am willing to believe that there was something very interesting in Indian knowledge with respect to health and yoga, if this is what we have by way of someone who practiced yoga at 93 or 94.

Around that time I encountered PPST -- the Patriotic and People-Oriented Science and Technology group. I had heard of them even when I was a student outside India. They were looking at traditional knowledge not as history or anthropology -- not as “the glory that was India” -- but in terms of its current relevance and potential.

What use or significance could it have today? I started taking a serious look at various aspects of traditional knowledge systems. It is an eclectic collection -- I worked on yoga, traditional Indian metallurgy, water management, and at some point I encountered Vrikshayurveda. My wife Viji and I decided to start an institution to look at traditional Indian knowledge systems from the point of view of agriculture -- helping people cultivate crops and grow them in good health based on traditional knowledge, wisdom, and practices. That was CIKS.

At first it looked like what people were doing was a collection of recipes. Where is the theory? People are using neem, people are using so many things. But slowly it struck me. Today people may say neem has efficacy because it contains Azadirachtin. But people have been using neem for thirty-plus centuries, long before this chemical composition was known. So what did they have in mind? Did they have a theory at all?

I got into Vrikshayurveda, the application of Ayurveda for traditional Indian plant science.

The biggest challenge we face when looking at traditional Indian sciences is that we are not a clean slate. We carry baggage. We have a checklist -- if you call something science or rigorous knowledge, it must have these five qualifications. And a lot of what you see around you fails that checklist immediately. You feel: this is superstition, where is the science? I think the easiest way to start is to address a few of these challenges head-on.

Venky: Let us start with them. Traditional Indian medical frameworks rest on categories like vata, pitta, kapha that seem to have not changed in millennia. A modern scientist looking at that would say: if your categories never change, how can this be science?

AVB: A few years back I witnessed a fascinating conversation between an outstanding vaidya (traditional healer) and a modern scientist -- a member of the national academy of sciences and the scientific advisory committee to the Prime Minister. We were at an airport together. The scientist started in a friendly way. In science, we have theories that are changing and evolving to solve new problems. But it looks like in Ayurveda you are living with the same categories for millennia -- vata, pitta, kapha. How do you understand this? Far from being defensive, the vaidya said confidently. Yes, it means there is a timelessness about our basic principles. They are not like fashions in clothes that you keep changing every year. The scientist was taken aback.

Looking back, I want to share how I made sense of this.

Around 1915, the Madras Presidency appointed the Usman Committee to travel across the region, interview hundreds of traditional physicians, assess efficacy and theory, and address the scientific basis Indian systems of medicine. The member secretary was a modern physician called Captain Srinivasa Murthy. He produced a small booklet, obscure and hardly known today, called The Scientific Basis of Indian Systems of Medicine. He addressed this question directly with a striking analogy.

Look at a list of all the peoples who have tried to attack India over thirty centuries. You can list them chronologically -- Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Portuguese, English. Or you can classify differently: those who came by land, those who came by sea, those who came by air. This second classification not only subsumes everything that happened in the past but is capable of accommodating anything in the future.

When an Ayurvedic physician understands whether a patient’s suffering arises from an imbalance of vata, pitta, or kapha, he is using this second kind of classification -- a scheme that exhausts the universe of discourse. So if you challenge a physician by saying “this virus was not around when Charaka Samhita was written” -- the physician says: produce the patient before me. I have a line of treatment based on doshic imbalance. The fact that this classification is timeless should not mislead us into thinking it is fossilised.

There is also a hierarchy of levels that yoga teachers talk about. One level is tattva -- the basic worldview. Another is shastra -- the science and technology derived from it. The third is prayoga -- application.

At the level of the basic siddhanta, there is timelessness.

At the level of shastra, things vary from time to time. An Ayurvedic text may prescribe sitting in padmasana for three hours -- written when yoga was practiced in a gurukula, where an eight-year-old child’s body, diet, and behaviour were entirely under the guru’s control. What you can prescribe is very different from today, when somebody walks in at forty-five, a chartered accountant with intense back pain.

At the level of prayoga, every patient and every context is different. The constant revision we valorise in modern science is one approach to rigour. The exhaustive classification that yields timeless categories is another.

Venky: I have been studying Patanjali's Yoga Sutras for some years now. It has significantly changed how I look at my work in agriculture. Given that you learned from Krishnamacharya and Desikachar, how did the practice of yoga specifically reshape the way you approached Indian knowledge systems?

AVB: Several ways. Let me try to isolate the most important ones.

The first was context-dependence. A text like Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is not a user manual. Nobody can pick it up and start practicing yoga the next morning. It needs interpretation for the specific practitioner, the specific condition, the specific time. One of the most fascinating things I learned is how yoga is adapted to the particular person. If you ask what practice helps someone with asthma: who is this person? Age? History? Daily routine? An abstract answer is not possible.

This brought me into direct conflict with what we consider the great virtue of modern scientific approach: standardisation.

I once accompanied a legendary Ayurvedic physician from Pune on a visit to a well-known Ayurvedic research facility. A young researcher proudly told us they had completely standardised a herbal formulation for diabetes. He listened patiently and said, “I hope you have also standardised the patients coming to you for treatment.”

The second was acceptance.

When people come saying they want to give up smoking, you cannot simply tell them smoking is bad. They already know it. If they could drop it on instruction, they would not need a teacher. You have to understand why they reach for the cigarette. Usually it is stress, tension, a kind of relief. If you help them find another way to manage that, one day the cigarette drops by itself. You accept people where they are and work from there.

The third was openness.

There was a psychologist who was asked by a German colleague at a European conference: What does yoga have to say about mental retardation? He looked blank. The German said, “Yoga has texts that have talked about the nature of the mind as far back as thirty centuries. They must have said something.”

He was humble enough to say, “I don’t know, let me find out”.

When he came back to Chennai, he went to the top three yoga experts in the city. The first two said: Mental disability, No problem, send them to us, we will cure them completely. Then he came to Desikachar.

Desikachar said: people with a large number of conditions come to us and in several cases we are able to help. I have no experience in mental disability. Let us do something. You send some of these children to me. Let us see if we can help, and you tell us if yoga is working.

That partnership went on for several decades.

What Krishnamacharya himself said was clear. Some shastras are for practical application. If the practical application is curing disease and improving health, you can pick up anything in your armoury that will help in that cause. He could be sometimes the senior partner, sometimes the junior partner, and -- most importantly -- there were times when he had the humility to say: for this condition I do not think I have anything specific to offer. Look elsewhere.

To him, tradition was not a fossilized thing. It changed and adapted. Sometimes during the course of reading a text, I would ask him a question out of idle curiosity. He would refuse to entertain it. He would just say: why do you need that now? I am not going to use that practically.

Venky: My wife was treated by an Ayurvedic physician for rheumatoid arthritis. The first thing he told her was: there is no such entity as rheumatoid arthritis in the worldview of Ayurveda. There is only amavata. That collision of two taxonomies is exactly what a farmer encounters when he is talking about a crop disease. Two completely different vocabularies for what may or may not be the same phenomenon. How do we navigate that?

AVB: Stay focused on the outcome. That is the only way to avoid getting lost.

Take anemia. Modern understanding: a deficiency of iron, or a deficiency in the capacity to metabolize iron. Supplement iron, treat accordingly. In Ayurveda, iron as a biochemical entity is not defined. The closest thing they have is pandu or pandurog.

If you present a hundred anemic patients to an Ayurvedic physician, he will likely say 85 of them have pandu. The other 15 may have something else.

Conversely, present a hundred pandu patients to a modern physician, and he may say only 80% are anemic. The overlap is large. The categories are not identical. The ayurvedia physician is not just treating iron deficiency. He is understanding which doshic imbalance is at work and addressing the whole configuration.

The trap we fall into is epistemic fascism. I hesitate to use a word that rough. But the trap is real. Rather than looking at the endpoint that science and technology is supposed to achieve, we get caught asking: are you using the right terminology? Only if you use this terminology will I recognize you.

There is also a cobweb we need to clear.

In Ayurveda we say that a substance that has such-and-such a taste is likely to have such-and-such a therapeutic property. My training as a biochemist sets off alarm bells. Where is the science in this?

A friend who was a theoretical physicist wrote me a letter when I first got interested in traditional knowledge. He said: Balu, if I look at texts of Greek mathematics and science -- Aristotle, Pythagoras -- however old they are, I feel they are scientific. But the Indian texts you describe seem all mixed up. I cannot accept this as science.

It is a genuine cry of anguish. But it points to a real epistemological difference.

Aristotle made a fundamental distinction between essential and non-essential sensibilia. We get knowledge through five sense organs. Something you can know through only one sense organ -- like the colour white, which you can see but not taste or touch -- was given a different, lesser epistemic status than something you can corroborate with a second sense, like number.

Galileo took it further. He said there is more in common between the weight of an apple and the weight of the moon than between the weight of an apple and the colour of an apple. This is the root of modern science’s insistence on quantifiable, corroborable, single-sense-independent measures.

Now look at how India approached this differently.

In Nyaya and Vaisheshika philosophy, some things can be grasped by one sense organ, some by more than one, and some only by the manas (discriminatory organ). But the Indian theoreticians said that the veracity of what you perceive has to be independently verified. You do not link it to whether it was sent through one sense organ or two.

This sounds very abstract until I had a practical experience of it.

We had a problem with fruit-and-shoot borer on brinjal -- a tough pest that neem cannot control. A few weeks later when I visited the field, our team said they had cracked it. I asked how. They said: we sprayed a solution of sirayani -- andrographis paniculata. Sirayani is used in medicine, but its agricultural application was not known to us. I asked: what made you try it? They said: the Vrikshayurveda principle is that bitter taste is one indicator of pesticidal potential. So we asked ourselves -- we have something that not even neem can control. Do we have something even more bitter than neem? Yes -- andrographis. We tried it. It worked.

In the absence of this example, the theoretical claim about taste and pesticidal properties sounds like hocus pocus. With this example, you see exactly what that framework was for

Venky: This brings us directly to the question I most wanted to explore.

What is the distinction between lok parampara(folk knowledge) and shastric parampara? (Classical Knowledge). This disinction came alive through my great-grandfather’s farming text from 1908 -- chapter after chapter quoting agricultural proverbs in sutra format, and describing village-level crop scientists testing and refining those proverbs in practice. The common assumption is that shastric parampara is the authoritative stream and lok parampara is folk knowledge waiting for validation from above. Is that accurate?

AVB: Not at all. They are not antipodal. They are almost a continuum.

A classical text like Charaka Samhita or Sushruta Samhita has a fully spelt-out theoretical framework -- the seven dhatus, the tridosha -- written in classical languages and transmitted as manuscripts. In lok parampara, the carriers are a very large number of people who have no formal training. Their knowledge is picked up from the family, the neighborhood, from living closely with plants and animals across generations.

The poet A.K. Ramanujan once said, “No Indian ever read the Ramayana or Mahabharata for the first time. Looks like they always have it.”

My mother was fifth-standard pass. I would hear her say: I have this headache, it is my own fault, I drank too much coffee on an empty stomach. She did not learn pitta aggravation from a textbook. It is part of the lok parampara.

What is remarkable is that the classical texts themselves recognise and honour this. In the Brihatrayee texts -- Charaka, Sushruta, and Ashtanga Hridaya -- there are explicit passages asking: From whom should you learn about locally prevalent herbs and their uses? From gopala, from shepherds, from the tapasis in the forest. The shastra itself says that your baseline of knowledge comes from the people.

Let me give you an example that shows both directions of this relationship.

A colleague was working in a tribal block. He documented that the tribals in that area used about 420 species of medicinal plants for various purposes. He went to a nearby IIT for help in validation. They told him: per plant, per application, you should budget five to ten years and fifteen to twenty lakhs. A lifetime of work to validate what the tribals had arrived at through generations of practice.

He was then put in touch with an Ayurvedic physician who gave him a larger perspective. Lok parampara and the shastric parampara share a common underlying worldview and terminology. They are not in competition.

I witnessed this alignment directly.

In the Araku Valley, we observed tribal farmers using dried goat droppings as fertiliser for vegetable crops. We proposed a simple field experiment -- one plot without fertiliser, one with chemical fertiliser, one with goat droppings. The tribal farmers stopped us immediately. They said: goat droppings are ushnam -- hot in potency. You should test it only for the winter crop. This idea that substances have thermal properties -- ushnam, sheethalam -- I had learned from Ayurvedic texts. But the tribal farmers had not learned it from any text. They had arrived at the same understanding through observation and transmission across generations.

The diarrhea work shows the other direction.

In that tribal area, local remedies were effective in about 65% of diarrhea cases but failed in about one-third. When Ramesh Nana examined the failures, he identified that the tribal diagnoses were accurate when the primary dosha was kapha or pitta. When the primary dosha was vata, their treatment was incomplete. He offered a simple addition to the diagnostic process -- how to identify whether vata was the primary factor. The efficacy went from 65% to 95%. He was not overriding their knowledge. He was building on it within the same worldview they already held.

The Panini grammar tradition has a beautiful reflection on this.

People are speaking all over the country in all kinds of ways. Is the specialist’s role to sit in judgment and say what is correct and what is not?

Panini tradition says no.

If I need a pot, I go to a potter and commission one. But if I am moved by a new emotion and need a new word for it, I do not go to a grammarian. The new word emerges in the marketplace. The specialist’s role is at a different level -- a meta level. To illuminate structure, to help people build on what is already living, not to grant or withhold permission for it.

Venky: The biologicals industry is now one of the most heavily venture-funded areas in agriculture. Brazil saw 75% growth over recent decades, and is very well moving toward decentralized biological systems. But the central limitation is shelf life and variability. If you had a blank cheque to invest in scaling Vrikshayurveda over the next ten to twenty years, where would you put it?

AVB: The shelf life challenge is real and we faced it ourselves from the beginning. Farmers had grown comfortable with a bottle of pesticide -- fixed concentration, spray it, done. They asked us reasonably: can you not give us something more user-friendly than saying bring eight kilos of this, two kilos of that, boil, filter, leave in the sun, and then spray?

The answer we found was already inside Ayurveda itself. Take tulsi kashayam -- a decoction made fresh at home, shelf life of one day. But Ayurveda prescribes storage forms with dramatically different shelf lives. Arkas -- distillates, including what we all grew up drinking as ajwain water -- last several weeks to months. Thailas, oils, last several months. Arishtas and asavas, the fermented preparations, can last several years. These are not exotic or inaccessible technologies. The Ayurvedic drug industry has been producing them for over a century. They do not require corrosive solvents. They do not require very high temperatures. They are reasonably scale-neutral.

We tested whether converting a plant extract to an arkam retained its biological properties. In a large number of herbs -- yes, the property is retained. Something with a shelf life of one day can have a shelf life extended to several weeks or two months.

Take andrographis. A kashayam made from it has a shelf life of one day. Can you make an arkam out of it? Yes. Can you make a churam -- reducing it further to ash and doing an additional preparation? Yes, and in some sense you are applying a framework from Ayurveda that gives an entirely different level of concentration and transformation.

There is a deeper philosophical point here. When Rauwolfia serpentina was encountered by the West over a century back, they fractionated and purified it and came up with the alkaloid reserpine. Reserpine turned out to have strong side effects not seen in the whole plant formulation. When you purify something from a full plant extract down to one or two compounds, you are not only concentrating those compounds, you are getting rid of everything else. Much of what you discarded was acting synergistically. The concentrated purified product is sometimes more dangerous precisely because the rest is gone.

Some of the most interesting possibilities are in seed treatment. Ayurveda prescribes bija samskara -- fumigating seeds with the fumes of certain herbs to confer disease resistance. We have treated seeds with andrographis and oroxylum. They seem to exhibit residual disease resistance. But we have not yet fully tested whether this property survives six months of storage. That is a genuine frontier.

CIKS has moved primarily in the direction of farmer training and field science, not product development. But that product development path is genuinely open. The Ayurvedic drug industry already knows how to prepare arkas and charams at scale. Someone only has to walk that road deliberately in the direction of agricultural biologicals.

Venky: One frontier that excites me is using computer vision to identify vata-pitta-kapha imbalances in plants from images -- the way NDVI indices or colour changes are already being tracked. Are there image databases that could be categorised this way?

AVB: It is certainly possible in principle. In Ayurveda, even in the case of human patients, there are sophisticated methods -- prakriti analysis, examination of the eyes, skin, tongue, posture -- that could in theory be translated into image-based classification. The same logic applies with plants. But to do it properly you need two things. First, a baseline: what does a genuinely healthy plant of each variety look like, in terms of luster, reflectivity, colour, texture? Second, a reference library: how does each type of doshic imbalance manifest in change from that baseline?

The honest answer is we have not even scratched the surface of this. It is genuinely possible and the tools exist. But no one has yet done the careful, systematic work of mapping Vrikshayurveda’s diagnostic categories onto measurable image parameters. That mapping is the hard part. Once it is done, the computer vision layer is almost easy.

Venky: Over the last forty to fifty years, we have seen the erosion of community-based structures in Indian agriculture -- panchayat bodies with no real authority, centralisation of decision-making, the slow hollowing out of the institutions that carried this knowledge. Who is the custodian of Vrikshayurveda now? Can an organisation hold that role, or does it have to stay rooted in community?

AVB: I think there is a significant misconception that has sent effort in the wrong direction. Many people have concluded that the primary challenge is protection -- safeguarding our knowledge from being stolen by others, blocking patents.

I was a small part of the neem and turmeric patent battles twenty-five years ago. People asked: is there anything in Siddha texts that describes turmeric’s wound-healing properties? We found it, we used it to challenge the patent.

But Let’s step back and ask the harder question.

Sushruta Samhita is roughly two thousand years old and carries this knowledge. If we had been doing anything with it over those two thousand years, would we not be world leaders in wound-healing today? We are not. We seem to have done nothing with it.

An ICMR scientist once put it to me with a sharp image. Have you seen those Hindi films where there is a box full of gold and diamonds and people search for it for years, and when they finally get close, a snake appears and hisses at them and drives them away? Our attitude to traditional knowledge is like that snake. We guard it fiercely. But we are doing nothing with it.

The neem story is instructive in the other direction. In the 1960s, Western scientists visiting Delhi saw some remarkable neem trees -- including some in the India International Centre campus. Within a couple of decades, the West had complete technological leadership in neem research and application. The first two World Neem Conferences were not organised by India. We claim twenty-five centuries of neem use. But we haven’t taken forward

Custodianship is important. But practice is even more important. A living farmer practice is worth more than any sloka in any text. Nobody learns to make wine by reading biochemistry and microbiology. Nobody learns to make rasam from a recipe alone. There are subtleties in practice that can only be transmitted through practice.

The best example I have is an old farmer we encountered when we first started working with herbal bioprotectants. People in the village mentioned him, slightly dismissively -- oh, there’s an old man who still does that sort of thing. We went to him. What he was doing was this: he had a large pot with about a third of its volume filled with cow urine. He would gather eight to ten plants, crush them, add them to the urine with a bit of water, seal the pot with cloth, and bury it. Every week or two he would unearth it briefly and stir it. After the fermentation was complete, he had a product -- extraordinary smell -- which, when filtered and sprayed, functioned as a broad-spectrum biopesticide. When we asked him which plants he chose, he said: these are not rigid rules. You can use plants that are bitter in taste. You can use plants that cattle refuse to graze. You can use plants whose stems produce a milky latex when broken, like arka or calotropis. Work within those principles and make your selection. That is a parampara. Translating that into field practice is something I could not have derived from any text in a lifetime of work.

Venky: I recently met a 75-year-old plantation owner in Kerala who told me that his fields respond differently when he walks through them -- that the plants are more vigorous when he is present and attentive. In the Indian tradition, the human being is part of the system. Has CIKS done any work on the role of the farmer’s presence -- his attentiveness, his relationship with the land -- and how that affects outcomes in the farm?

AVB: I have not studied it rigorously, and I want to be honest about that. But I am also unwilling to dismiss it.

What I can say is that the mental element is unambiguously strong in the treatment of human beings and plants. In yoga and Ayurvedic treatment, how you approach a patient, how you guide them, what path you lead them down matters enormously. A direct answer is not always the right intervention.

There is a teaching story in the vaidya tradition.

A man comes complaining of baldness, has spent enormous sums trying every remedy. The vaidya says, "I can help you”. It will cost fifty thousand rupees, and it will take forty-one days. The man agrees. After forty-one days, the vaidya hands him a bottle of oil and says: apply this every day. One condition: while applying the oil, you must never think about monkeys. The man laughs and says: I never think about monkeys, this is no condition at all. Two weeks later he returns looking like a wreck. He says: I cannot apply the oil without my mind filling up with nothing but monkeys. The vaidya says: at your age, some things are natural. There is no cure for that. Why did you not tell me this directly? He said: if I had told you at the outset, you would have walked out and gone to the next practitioner who would promise a cure for one lakh, or the one after that for two lakhs. Now you have walked this path. Now you believe me.

This is exactly what you are pointing at. Sometimes the person most involved in a system -- whether patient or farmer -- arrives at understanding through a path they had to walk themselves, not through information transferred from outside.

What an attentive farmer does concretely is also worth noting: he observes in fine detail. He notices what is uneven. He pays attention to small changes in specific corners of the field. That attentiveness in itself is an intervention. Whether it also operates on some other level -- whether plants respond to something beyond the physical presence, the observation, the care -- that is something genuinely worth exploring. I have heard too many credible people describe it to dismiss it. But I have not done the work to speak to it with confidence.

Venky: When I search for Vrikshayurveda today, almost everything I find is still trying to justify its existence. After so many hundreds of years of exploration in this land, we still have to prove that it exists. What thought would you leave people with?

AVB: Learning about tradition is not a finished product. It continues.

When Krishnamacharya was more than 97 years old, there was a conference about teaching yoga to children with special needs. People came from various parts of India. In the middle of the gathering, he was asking curious, detailed questions of all the people who came -- what was working, what was not. Somebody remarked that he was still so curious at this age. He said, very naturally: even now I consider myself a student. What is the problem?

As Dr. Radhakrishnan once said, “It takes centuries of living to make a little history, and it takes centuries of history to make a little tradition.” It is not out of nowhere. But then it needs somebody with the patience and seriousness to figure out what from those traditions is relevant for today, in this context -- and what is not.

If Krishnamacharya could say that at 97, there is still a great deal for all of us to learn and do.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Over the past few days, I have been sitting with this caffeinated truth that is definitely not powered by Redbull: Life Gives You Wings.

Perhaps, the high has something to do with the intense conversations I had over the last few days at the Indian School of Business Food Systems Event. I anchored and moderated a stellar panel on four axes of food systems: Sarkaar (State), Bazaar (Markets), Samaaj (Society) and Sanchar (Media, Data and Narratives) with four amazing people representing each of these four axes.

The conversations at the event had all six flavours you would typically find in Ugadi pachadi many of us in this part of India make at the onset of new year in the Indian calendar.

It’s fascinating to see my relationship with Indian calendar deepening, beautifully designed with deep agrarian wisdom marking marking the end of the winter crop (Rabi) harvest and the beginning of the new agricultural cycle before the monsoon. In contrast, Gregorian calendar looks lame with January 1st selected for roman administrative reasons. 

I heard spicy tales of courage from entrepreneurs sharing their conviction in leaving high-paying jobs and venturing into the wild dark forest called food systems. I heard sour challenges from entrepreneurs frustrated by the price-ceiling that makes Indian consumers settle for mediocre food choices and bargain the hell out of everything everywhere, despite having higher financial cushion. I heard bitter challenges of newly minted entrepreneurs from civil society ecosystem reeling from guilt, unable to wear the entrepreneur hat after being in the NGO sector that abhors markets and entrepreneurship. I heard tangy tales of enthusiasm from freshly blossomed entrepreneurs braving along the volatility of the market. Of course, I also heard salty tales of ordinary citizens sharing profound truths that they have discovered once they stepped out of mindless moneymaking hamster wheel.

Yesterday, during a round table dialogue on changing food choices of consumers, I mumbled something that startled me.

The art of producing safe, healthy and nutritiously rich food is not a scalable, sustainable business model, unless until you are willing to make trade-offs that limit to what extent you can bring them within the constraints of your supply chain.

At the end of the day, this much is clear. Markets are a product of tradeoffs and conversations.

Many who work on bringing safe and nourishing food to the market are charged by the fuel of passion, not sound economics underpinning what they do. Unless we build a solid economics case that lets them continue doing what they are doing, they are going to get soon burnt out and we are going to be left with mediocre foods choices.

With my work transitioning from a strict agritech/agribusiness lens to Food and Agriculture System lens, I am watching life lovingly providing me with wings to go beyond my comfort zone and help me address this regenerative transition challenge head on.

Now that I gear up to host 44 agripreneurs at sixth Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat at Bhopal, my impact thesis is expanding beyond entrepreneurship.

My ecosystem work is getting bit more structured. I now have a calendar of activities I plan to do over the next six months. It’s looking ambitious as of now and I want to push my boundaries with three audacious attempts and an encore of Agripreneurs Retreat in September 2026 at Chandigarh.

1. Bring together agripreneurs at conflict-laden Srinagar for a day long immersion with agripreneurs and explore how agripreneurs of Srinagar and Kashmir can work with the India Agripreneur ecosystem. Time Period Planned: May 2026

2. Bring together bankers, investment professionals for an exclusive 1 day workshop on funding regenerative transition. Time Period Planned: June 2026

3. Bring together religious organisations that work on regenerative transition and see how to build ecosystemic gameplays. Time Period Planned: July 2026

4. After Bhopal Agripreneur Retreat, I plan to do the next Agripreneur Retreat in Chandigarh on September 24-25-26.

Why Chandigarh? I am dreaming of Regenerative Punjab and haven’t done anything in that beautiful land of mustard fields, now addled with youngsters either deluded by Canada dreams or drug abuse.

Each of these are wildly ambitious in my current assessment and I honestly don’t know how I am going to pull these off. I guess. When life gives you wings, you simply have to fly!

If you have ideas and connections that can help me pull these off, do ping me. When I was growing up in south of India, one of my favourite cartoons was Captain Planet.

I could still sing the Theme song with a mug of Kombucha!

I don’t know if Captain Planet would approve of this. But I am convinced that when entrepreneurs come together as a collective, we could make a dent in the impact universe!

Wish me good luck and prayers!

Love and Cheers,

Venky

State of Agritech - 12th March 2026

1/ Systems Investor’s Dozen for Indian Agriculture

Detailed notes outlining 13 investment opportunities in Indian Agriculture for systems investors who are impact-first and see returns as a by-product. Based on a recent presentation I made to a group of external investors.

2/ Making Sense of Polybee Fundraise

Polybee just raised $4.3M to do something bees do for free. Polybee marks a new dawn of precision pollination. What are the evolutionary tradeoffs of precision pollination?

3/ El-Nino Returns With Vengeance

Historically, the gap between strong El Niño events has never been less than seven years. That is changing as we enter another El-Nino year in 2026 soon after 2023.

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

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State of Agritech - 10th March 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ Women’s Day, Year of Woman Farmer And Other Inanities

2026 has been officially declared the International Year of the Woman Farmer by well-meaning folks at FAO. And another Women’s Day went by. I don’t know about you. I feel queasy. No, strike that. It actually feels deeply ironic to celebrate both. Not for reasons you might think though.

In 1970, Danish economist Ester Boserup published “Woman's Role in Economic Development”. Based on her documentation of how women contributed immensely to Agriculture in African societies, she discovered an interesting pattern. At the risk of making this a procrustean narrative of men vs women, you could call it “Male Takeover” thesis.

When an activity is informal, low-status, or subsistence-level, women do it. The moment it becomes commercially valuable, credentialed, or institutionally recognised, men move in and women are pushed to the margins.

You can see this across farming activities and sectors and value chains.

Take the case of seed systems. Women were running community-driven seedbanks for a long time. When Green Revolution came and challenged the earlier paradigm with state-sponsored resources, men took charge and community seedbanks were relegated to the fringes of rural consciousness.

Take value chains which haven’t been commercialized extensively. Tubers like Purple Yam. Edible Weeds with incredible nutrient density. Picture someone growing them in your head. Be honest. Is the grower male or female? You know the answer.

As rice farming scaled up in Asia, women lost decision-making authority even though they had been the primary rice cultivators. As dairy became commercially organised in India, women who had managed household dairy for generations lost control to cooperatives run by men.

Animal husbandry carries ‘husbandry’ for a reason. As floriculture grew into an export industry, male entrepreneurs captured it while women remained casual wage labour.

If we go back to the early agricultural societies, whenever hand tools like the hoe and the digging stick were used, they were used by the women farmers. Men were the hunters, women were the gatherers.

At least until plough came along.1

Women spent seasons observing the same plants, learning which seeds returned most reliably, understanding germination and soil and seasonal timing. Agriculture, Boserup argued, was the direct extension of that knowledge.

In “The Invisible Sex”, J.M. Adovasio, director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, and Olga Soffer, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois went further. They argued that women were not merely contributors to early agriculture. They were its inventors.

The religious historian Carol P. Christ arrived at the same place through Neolithic mythology, ritual, and archaeology. She argued that women invented not just agriculture, but also farming, pottery, and weaving. More importantly, she argued that women invented the knowledge systems that preserved these discoveries. Women encoded their knowledge in song, story, and ritual, whether through the planting ceremonies, the harvest rites or the seed-blessing traditions that appear in every agricultural culture on earth.

The Greek goddess Demeter. The Egyptian Isis who taught starving people to grow wheat. The Roman Ceres who gave her name to cereal itself. In Hindu traditions, among the eight forms of wealth goddesses, Dhanya lakshmi was the goddess who blessed us with abundance of grains. The examples could go on across diverse cultural memories we have preserved in every culture.

In their fascinating book, “The Dawn of Everything”, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow put it beautifully

Are you seeing the irony here?

Women built the knowledge systems that birthed agriculture, encoded it in ritual, and passed it down across generations. And we have the audacity to call it “The International Year of Woman Farmer”.

The irony goes much deeper when you consider the very word “Farmer” and its structural male origins.

Every major word for "farmer" — across English, Latin, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Arabic-borrowed Deccan vocabulary — is rooted in the plough or legal land tenure.

In English, “farmer” comes from the Medieval Latin firma, meaning a fixed payment or rent. A farmer was originally a legal tenant who held land under a fixed-rent contract. Since medieval European property law defined all legal parties as male, the word “farmer” was masculine by structure.

The same is the case with the colonial administrative word — ryot, raiyat — which came from Arabic ra’iyah, meaning flock, subjects. A ryot was a male who had acquired the legal right to hold land.

Latin provides an interesting twist in this tale. Agricola - farmer - should grammatically be feminine. But since the noun referred to what Roman society had already decided was a male occupation, the language overrode its rules and assigned it masculine gender.

When we go to languages thar predate the plough and the colonial revenue system, we get in touch with fluid identities of growers.

Take the case of Swahili, where the living, colloquial term for the person who grows and sells food is mama mboga (mother of vegetables). The official Swahili word for farmer, mkulima, is gender-neutral. Mama mboga is the word people actually use.

Or closer home, take the case of Santali, spoken by the Santal people of Jharkhand, Odisha, and West Bengal. It is one of India's oldest living languages. It has no grammatical gender on nouns. No masculine or feminine for occupational words.

The word for a cultivator is chasa. Technically neutral. Santal men use call cultivators as chasa hor, where hor is the Santal word for both "man" and "human being." The people call themselves hor.

Barring older languages, the language built the male farmer into its etymology. Unless, we see the irony in using the word “farmer” and replace it with “grower”, there is no point celebrating “The Year of the Woman Farmer”.

Let’s be clear. This is not about just about history or linguistics.

This is the ground reality as well in countries like India where there are more labourers than farmers. Spend a quiet afternoon in almost any farm across India. You are most likely to find women working in the fields. Driven by male out-migration to cities, the feminization of Indian agriculture is accelerating in Indian fields. Women are de facto farm managers across large parts of rural India. Running farms they cannot legally own. Making decisions they are not institutionally recognised to make. Servicing debts taken in their husbands' names.

And yet when you look at official marketing narratives from government engines, you see something like this.

Of course, this is not to berate the Government.

As I wrote in “State of Agri-Mechanization”, this feminization is making its presence felt in the political sphere with a 227% rise in welfare spending for women in agriculture. Agripreneurs I speak to across the country are largely convinced that Village-Level Entrepreneurs are better run when helmed by women.

The institutional logic has not evolved with these ground realities. The extension worker still finds it more convenient to engage with the male farmer. The Kisan Credit Card is in the man's name. The FPO leadership roster is still male by default.

The agriculture that India needs most urgently right now is the agriculture that most resembles what women built in the first place.

Agroecology runs on capabilities the Green Revolution made redundant. It requires intimate knowledge of local seed varieties and their responses to specific microclimate It requires observing soil behaviour, pest cycles, and plant health in ways no external advisory can replicate. It requires place-based, long-duration ecological attention.

This is no idealism wrapped in feminist stripes.

Last week, I wrote about APCNF programme — Andhra Pradesh Community-managed Natural Farming.

It did not take off because bureaucrats designed a better input package. It took off because women in SHGs became the primary practitioners and knowledge-carriers of zero-budget natural farming. In 4,116 program Gram Panchayats, 9,741 village Self-Help-Group federations, 287,084 women Self-Help Programs with a membership of 30,07,072 women are in charge. Among, 10,000+ community resource persons driving this program, 60% are women.

The national conversation about scaling agroecology is almost entirely happening among men in think tanks, policy committees and agritech boardrooms. The knowledge is feminine. The authority over it is not.

There is a lot to be done from land titles to women-led seed banks to designing FPO leadership structures. When the government designs the institutions to scale natural farming nationally, women should not be the target beneficiary. They should be the governing authority.

The Green Revolution spent sixty years making her invisible. Today, we are content to play DEI games with platitudes and tokenism. Take the case of policy names. MFME, Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana, Mukhya Mantri Udyami Yojana — women appear across schemes, while leaving existing structures intact.

The time for banal homilies is over.

Epilogue:

In our Agripreneur retreats so far, we have had less participation from women founders. Those who joined though have had some amazing feedback to share (Hear this straight from Archana Stalin and Rishita Changede) about our retreats.

I've been trying hard to bring many women founders to our retreats. I have been asked to give scholarships and other incentives for more participation. But I feel uncomfortable as it feels patronizing. In my head, a founder is a founder, irrespective of gender.

For the upcoming retreat in Bhopal, we have less than 5 percent of participation from women founders. I am eager to change this. Would you have ideas to bring more women founders to our retreats? I am all ears.

State of Agritech - 6th March 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ Can Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) be scaled across India?

Indian agriculture plays a strange Jekyll and Hyde act.

During the day, the government foots the ventilator bill of the conventional chemical farming system. Every year, ₹1,75,099 crore — roughly $21 billion flows in as synthetic fertilizer subsidies, keeping the dying system alive. Urea reaches farmers at a fraction of its production cost. The drip has been running for decades despite depleting the soil, guzzling water and trapping farmers in feudal chokepoints. It is a political hot potato no politican worth her spine will dare to touch.

At night, the same government funds a programme to replace chemical farming entirely. One million farmers in Andhra Pradesh are now practising chemical-free natural farming.

Can this model scale across India? What would a strong investment case that could back this scaling effort after considering every possible objection look like? Settle down with green tea, if you will. We will address all of this and attempt to look at the elephant that eludes us all.

Before we navigate the choppy waters of complexity involved in scaling this effort, let me breathe and meditate on this important chart.

The village count was identical in 2020-21 and 2022-23 — 3,730 villages both years — but farmers grew from 480,000 to 851,000 in that period. It suggests that the program perhaps deepened within existing villages before expanding to new ones. Village saturation before expansion is a healthy signal of genuine community diffusion.

The farmer-to-area ratio is also striking. 1.13 million farmers on 524,000 Ha = 0.46 Ha per farmer on average. AP's average farm size is about 1.06 Ha. APCNF is overwhelmingly concentrated in the smallest landholding category — marginal farmers below 0.5 Ha. The 2025-26 plan is a near-doubling of village coverage — from 4,116 to 8,390.

The national programme to replicate this — the National Mission on Natural Farming, launched in November 2024 — targets 40 lakh farmers across 28 Indian districts by 2030.

The 2025-26 budget gave it ₹616 crore. The fertilizer subsidy got ₹1,75,099 crore.

Can you see this fascinating contradiction?

That’s the crux of the problem we are dealing with. This ratio -0.35% - is, perhaps, the most expensive act of policy incoherence in Indian agricultural history. If we are serious about correcting this, it is important to delve deep into the contradiction and find a way out.

Where Scaling Might Fail

The standard argument against natural farming — repeated by agricultural economists, policymakers, and input industry lobbyists — goes like this. The transition to organic or natural farming causes a yield penalty in the first several years, during which farmers lose income. Smallholders with no savings buffer cannot absorb that loss. Therefore, natural farming is a luxury for rich-country hobbyists and cannot feed a country of 1.4 billion.

This argument has driven agricultural policy for forty years. It is the justification for ₹1,75,099 crore in annual fertilizer subsidies. It is the reason every natural farming program in India has been treated as a niche welfare intervention rather than a mainstream agricultural strategy.

Let’s now walk further with the devil’s advocate in context with the data showcased by APCNF.

The Andhra Pradesh programme’s income improvement data — farmers earning 57% more than their chemical-farming neighbours by year four — comes primarily from assessments commissioned by the implementing agency, RySS. The most rigorous independent study, from the University of Reading, partially validated these findings but found yield improvements in only three of five AP districts studied. Context-specific variation, the researchers noted. Not a blanket success.

There is also a labour cost problem that the headline numbers hide. Natural farming increases labour hours — bio-stimulant preparation, intensive crop management, diversified planting systems. The income improvement figures measure the return on cash expenditure, not total economic cost. For households with competing off-farm income options, the net gain is smaller than the 57% figure suggests.

Then there is the equity gap. A 2024 peer-reviewed paper from Coventry University and the Food Sovereignty Alliance India documented that APCNF’s use of women’s self-help group credit infrastructure primarily benefits land-owning farmers.

Agricultural labourers — more than half of India’s agricultural workforce — are structurally excluded from a programme that is being celebrated as transformational for India’s rural poor.

Let’s be clear. NMNF is not APCNF.

The national programme uses a lighter delivery model — routed through Krishi Vigyan Kendras and Bio-Input Resource Centres rather than the intensive SHG-embedded Community Resource Person network that APCNF spent a decade building in Andhra Pradesh. AP’s results required a pre-existing dense women’s federation infrastructure that most Indian states do not have. Whether the lighter model can replicate APCNF-level behaviour change on a five-year timeline is, as of today, an open question.

There is also the Sikkim precedent.

In 2016, Sikkim became India's first fully organic state , winning the FAO Future Policy Award in 2018. Within a few years, cardamom yields — the state's primary cash crop — had fallen sharply, with over 60% of plantations becoming barren. A CSE survey of 16 farms across Sikkim's four districts found that only two of 14 private farmers reported any yield increase after the transition; ginger production on some farms fell to a third of earlier levels.

The state now imports significant food from outside its borders. Critics noted that organic certification benefited tourism and premium export markets far more than it helped the average farming household.

Sikkim's organic transition was state-mandated, fast, and uniform — synthetic inputs were banned outright. APCNF's model is the opposite of Sikkim: the transition is voluntary, gradual, and community-managed, with crop diversification built in from the start.

Sikkim's yield decline did not appear immediately. It emerged several years after transition — precisely the horizon at which APCNF is now operating in its earliest villages. The question is not whether APCNF farmers are doing well in years one to three. It is whether the model holds at year seven, eight, nine. AP now has villages that have been fully NF long enough to answer that.

Mind you, these are not random objections. They are the central empirical uncertainties in dealing with the scaling question. Now that we have examined every possible way this system could fail, let’s now look at what the data is actually telling us.

What the Data Actually Tells Us

Critics point out that AP’s total fertiliser consumption has actually risen — from 3.5 million tonnes in 2016-17 to 4 million tonnes in 2024-25. If the programme is working, shouldn’t the state be using less?

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This piece assumes that the reader is somewhat familiar with India’s decentralized governance systems. I am writing this wearing a catalyst lens who is trying to get into the innards of the system to see which levers are worth plugging into to accelerate regenerative transition. Special thanks to Rohit Parakh for his webinar with Vijayanand G that birthed this piece and the MST 2023 group which emphasized on the need to study the 16th Finance Commission Report more closely.

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Carpe Diem, Panchayat?

It should take you eight minutes to read this.

Every five years, India runs an elaborate fiscal ritual.

The President appoints a Finance Commission. Economists, retired civil servants, and academics tour state capitals, collect data, conduct studies, and ultimately decide how much of the Union’s tax revenues should flow to the states, and more importantly, the panchayats and municipalities that sit at the base of India’s governance pyramid.

The 16th Finance Commission, chaired by Arvind Panagariya, tabled its report in Parliament on February 1, 2026. The headlines focused on the big numbers: ₹7.91 lakh crore for local bodies over five years with ₹4.35 lakh crore earmarked for rural local bodies alone—an 84 percent increase over the 15th Finance Commission.

Here is where things get interesting. Of the ₹4.35 lakh crore allocated to panchayats, 80 percent (₹3.48 lakh crore) is “basic grant” and 20 percent (₹87,048 crore) is “performance grant.”

Let’s be clear. The basic grant is not exactly basic.

Fifty percent of it is tied to sanitation, solid waste management, and water management. The remaining fifty percent is untied, meaning panchayats can theoretically spend it on whatever falls within their constitutional mandate. Add up the tied water-sanitation portion and the untied component. Approximately 60 percent of the total rural local body grant is, in principle, available for purposes beyond roads.

This is where the 16th Finance Commission does something quietly radical.

For the first time in the history of Union Finance Commission grants, there is an explicit ceiling on road expenditure: No more than 20 percent of the untied fund can be spent on construction and maintenance of roads.

Why does this matter? Because over the past decade of Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) implementation, the overwhelming majority of Finance Commission grants have gone into cement-concrete roads.

Not agriculture. Not watershed development. Not natural farming.

Roads.

As Shri S.M. Vijayanand (Retd. IAS, Former Secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj) put it bluntly in a webinar: “Most panchayats have spent most of the money on cement concrete roads in most parts of India.”

The 14th Finance Commission allowed seven expenditure categories; agriculture was not among them. The 15th Finance Commission created an untied component, but nobody used it for agriculture. Nobody even tried.

The 20 percent road cap changes this arithmetic. It is not a perfect solution. Panchayats determined to build roads will find ways to reclassify expenditure. Civil society organizations working on regenerating food and agriculture systems have a window to insert themselves before the default choices get made.

Which brings us to the language of the Commission.

Fifty percent of the basic grant is tied to "sanitation and solid waste management, and/or water management." Water management. Not water supply. Not piped drinking water. Water management. The report does not define the phrase precisely, and this perhaps is an opportunity.

Government engineers will interpret it narrowly—drainage systems, municipal plumbing. But watershed management is also water management. Soil moisture conservation is water management. Farm ponds, check dams, contour bunding—all water management. And all foundational infrastructure for regenerating food and agriculture systems.

For those working at the intersection of agriculture and panchayati raj, the task is to claim this ambiguity before water supply departments do. If watershed management becomes legible as water management in the state-level GPDP guidelines now being drafted, a substantial portion of the tied grant opens up for regenerative landscape interventions.

Mind you. The Commission has not said "don't fund watershed work." It has said "fund water management." The question is who gets to define what that means. The window is open now. It will not stay open forever.

But there is a countervailing force. The Commission has also allocated ₹10,000 crore as a one-time "urbanization premium"—an incentive for states that merge peri-urban villages into adjoining urban local bodies. The explicit objective is to accelerate urbanization, which the Commission describes as a "catalyst for economic development."

The report is unambiguous: with 46 percent of the workforce still in agriculture producing only 17.8 percent of value added, "the movement of workers out of rural into urban areas... holds considerable potential to raise the overall value added per worker."

I am not fully bought onto this. Why not create facilities in rural areas rather than create facilities in urban areas for people from rural areas to migrate to? The deeper problem, however, is not the Commission's contradictory stance. It is the decade of institutional failure that precedes it.

GPDP was designed to be a participatory planning process. In 2015, when the 14th Finance Commission devolved unprecedented resources directly to gram panchayats, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj—then led by Vijayanand himself as Secretary—rolled out GPDP guidelines drawing inspiration from Kerala's 1996 People's Plan Campaign for decentralization.

The idea was that gram sabhas would conduct situational analysis, identify development priorities, and prepare plans from below. States were invited to a "write shop" at the Kerala Institute of Local Administration, where they drafted state-specific guidelines mentored by experts. Within a year, over 2.4 lakh gram panchayats had prepared their own development plans for the first time in the history of Panchayati Raj.

The reality today is different.

As Vijayanand now describes it: "Participatory exercise is not there, there is no development analysis of what is the situation, and it is just infrastructure oriented."

In most states, the Block Development Officer prepares the plan. Panchayat presidents often don't know what's in it. The software portal where plans are uploaded shows one thing; what actually gets implemented is entirely different. The conditionalities imposed by the Union Ministry—select from drop-down menus, choose only prescribed options—violate both letter and spirit of decentralization.

The facade of participation exists. Genuine deliberation and people's priorities remain absent.

Meanwhile, the real action in state finances has been elsewhere. The 16th Finance Commission devotes an entire chapter to the explosion of subsidies. The picture is sobering.

State subsidies have nearly tripled from ₹3.86 lakh crore in 2018-19 to an estimated ₹9.43 lakh crore in 2025-26. Agricultural subsidies specifically have grown from ₹29,610 crore to ₹91,389 crore in the same period.

Here is the most disconcerting piece of the subsidy puzzle.

The share of unconditional cash transfers within agricultural subsidies has risen from 58.8 percent in 2018-19 to 70.2 percent in 2023-24. Schemes like Rythu Bandhu in Telangana and state top-ups to PM-KISAN now dominate agricultural spending. The Commission warns that large-group cash transfers—growing at 53.6 percent annually—”will not only impose a significant burden on the States’ budgets but also destabilise their finances in the long run.”

The contrast is stark. States are pouring money into cash transfers to farmers while the panchayat system—designed to enable farmer-driven local planning—remains a shell.

The cash goes directly to individual bank accounts; the capacity for collective action at the village level atrophies. This is not an argument against income support. It is an observation about what gets built and what doesn’t.

Cash transfers require no institutional infrastructure beyond JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile). Natural farming requires troubleshooting mechanisms, input supply chains, community resource persons, SHG-panchayat coordination—the patient work of institution building that nobody is funding.

Can the next five years be different?

The answer depends on understanding the difference between position power versus delegated authority.

The Constitution, through the 73rd Amendment, establishes panchayats as “institutions of local self-government” with mandate for “economic development and social justice.” This is position power—inherent authority flowing from constitutional status.

Delegated authority is what state governments choose to give through specific legislation. Most states have not delegated meaningful agricultural functions to panchayats. They allow seedling distribution, awareness camps—but not real agricultural planning.

Panchayats already have position power for local economic development. A gram panchayat can decide to promote natural farming in a gram sabha. It can use Finance Commission grants for land development, watershed management, irrigation infrastructure. The formal authority exists. What’s missing is motivation, capacity, and support.

This is where civil society and SHG-panchayat linkage becomes a powerful lever.

The Ministry of Panchayati Raj has mandated this linkage, and with SHGs covering approximately 60 percent of rural households, mobilizing SHG women to attend gram sabhas creates a powerful constituency.

If they come prepared—understanding regenerative transition’s benefits, ready to articulate demand—the dynamics shift. The gram sabha is constitutionally the sovereign body of local governance; its decisions have legal force. But attendance in most of India is pathetic.

Meetings are often not held; someone signs the register. SHGs can change this. They bring numbers, voice, and organized capacity. The equity dimension matters here too: SHG women can manufacture inputs as microenterprises, take fallow land on lease for collective cultivation. Natural farming need not become another landed-farmer program. The landless could also gain from regenerative transition.

The 16th Finance Commission is not a silver bullet. Many states have never operationalized their SFC recommendations. It cannot force states to give panchayats real functions. The constitutional mandate for panchayats lists subjects like agriculture, land improvement, minor irrigation, animal husbandry, fisheries, social forestry, minor forest produce, and so on. But these are “may be devolved” subjects, not “must be devolved.” Most states have not devolved them in any meaningful way.

It cannot substitute for farmer demand. If farmers do not want natural farming, if they are not convinced that yields will stabilize, if they do not see the cost reductions and health benefits, no amount of panchayat-level resource availability will matter.

The 84 percent increase sounds impressive until you adjust for inflation; in real terms, the gain is marginal. The states that need decentralization most are the states least equipped to meet the Commission’s performance thresholds. These tensions will not resolve themselves. But the question is not whether the policy is perfect. The question is whether those who believe in a different agricultural future can find the leverage points within it.

The road cap has created an opening. The water management ambiguity has created an opening. The SHG-panchayat mandate has created an opening.

Carpe diem, panchayat. The next five years will tell us whether we seized the day.

References and Further Reading:

• Rohit Parakh Webinar with Vijayanand G

• 16th Finance Commission Report Summary (PRS India)

• Full Report of 16th Finance Commission

• 16th Finance Commission recommends Rs 8 lakh crore grant to local bodies (Down to Earth)

• Grants expanded but Gram Panchayats face stricter compliance (Down to Earth)

• 16th Finance Commission overhauls forest formula (Down to Earth)

• Heatwaves and lightning should be added to national disaster list (Down to Earth)

• Rs 3.56 lakh crore more needed per year for public health (The Print)

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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State of Agritech - 20th February 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ BharatVistaar Vs Myca.Ag

What two contrasting AI platforms tell us about how public and private agritech are built in India? Can BharatVistaar, the national Digital Public Infrastructure for Agriculture, court the likes of Myca.Ag? Can Amul do for BharatVistaar what Google Pay and PhonePe did for the UPI revolution?

2/ Farmers For Forests Vs 14 Trees Foundation Vs Say Trees

How do we see, ahem, the forest of reforestation ventures? Can we contrast some of the leading players and see the ecosystemic gameplay at large?

3/ Q3 FY 26 Results: Paradeep Phosphates Vs Coromandel Vs Chambal Fertilizers Vs Deepak Fertilizers

4/ A Tale of Two Seed Systems

China’s weakness is India’s strength (and vice-versa). China is trying to engineer its way out of a food security crisis caused by the loss of diversity. India still has the diversity. The question is whether India will protect that asset and build modern infrastructure around it, or follow China's path and lose it first, then spend billions trying to reconstruct it from genome databases?

5/ Why does Andhra Pradesh lead the charts in debt?

Credit access is no silver bullet. Without market linkage, price assurance, and input cost management, credit access becomes essentially a debt delivery mechanism rather than a development tool.

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Read more

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?

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Subscriber-only Post Trailers

Is “Two Brothers Organic” Facing a Hamletian “Organic” Identity Crisis?

Why does a company with ECOCERT, USDA Organic, and NPOP certifications still feel compelled to prove they're glyphosate-free? Doesn’t it point to something broken in how consumers perceive the organic label itself?

Satyajit recently announced that Two Brothers Organic Farms® became, in his words, “India’s first brand to secure the independent Glyphosate Residue-Free Certification for ghee, atta and jaggery.”

With eroding trust on organic labels in India, Two Brothers Organic Farms (TBOF) has adopted a hybrid strategy that mixes standard "process certification" (Ecocert) with aggressive "product verification" (Detox Project).

At one level, it makes sense.

In India, many “organic” dairy farms fail because while they may not inject cows with hormones, they cannot control the fodder the cows eat. Farmers often buy dry fodder (straw/hay) from neighbors who use Glyphosate (Roundup) as a desiccant or weedkiller. Glyphosate sprayed on fodder crops enters the cow’s digestive system and can concentrate in the milk and fat (ghee).

At another level, it doesn’t make sense.

More in a subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System.

Post-Facto: Sandeep Bhargava, Founder-Director, OneCert International, made a fascinating comment:

“[Are they] able to stop air contamination or water contamination. Many operations claim pesticides free etc. They have grown crops without using pesticides. Their is still chance of contamination or traces due to past use of land. Lab test also report up to a level like 0.01 ppm. They do not report pesticides free. Therefore claiming pesticide or glyphosate free is mis leading, they may use claim no glysophate used on farm. That’s by NOP allow sale of material as organic if traces are less than 5 percentage of EPA limit.”

Rain-Shadow Side of India-EU deal

What if India had allowed New Zealand and European cheese, SMP, and butter in at reduced tariffs?

India produces 239 million metric tonnes of milk annually—a quarter of global output, more than any nation. This comes from 80 million farming households, typically keeping 1-5 animals. Half of all cattle rearers own only 1-2 animals; these small herds contribute 29% of total production and 22% of milk sold.

But here’s what makes Indian dairy structurally different: 38% of rearers don’t cite milk sales as their primary motivation for keeping cattle. In Jharkhand, that figure is 71%. They keep cattle for household nutrition. For dung—cited by 74% as a key benefit. For draft power. For insurance against crop failure. For socio-cultural reasons no spreadsheet captures.

The EU maintains dairy subsidies of €8-12 billion annually through the Common Agricultural Policy. EU farms operate at industrial scale, supported by infrastructure and direct payments Indian smallholders cannot match.

In years 1-3, subsidized European products would flood urban markets at prices below cooperative costs. Private processors—Nestlé, Britannia, Mother Dairy—would face pressure to switch to cheaper imported ingredients.

In years 3-7, cooperative procurement economics would begin collapsing. If processors can buy imported powder cheaper than fresh milk, why maintain village collection networks? The daily milk collection that provides daily cash to farming households becomes economically unviable.

In years 7-15, the 190,000+ dairy cooperative societies would face an existential choice: consolidate dramatically or dissolve. The small rearers—those 49% who keep only 1-2 animals—would have nowhere to sell. They would exit.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System

Post-Facto: Ashish made a fascinating point:

“There is hardly any discussion holding consumers responsible for this state, when they are the most important stakeholder for agrifood Systems. But what if this aspect turns around with the Indian Consumer becoming loyal to Indian produced goods/produce? This will also mean Apples, Almonds and Walnuts produced here - with whatever quality/seasonal limiations they exist - are preferred by the consumers? Then no matter what goods flow into India if no one buys them, then they meet their end of life here at the expense of the American economy!”

Muhammad Riaz from World Bank made me think deeply about the gender dimension, something I hadn’t considered deeply: “In Rural India and Pakistan, animal husbandry is the responsibility of women of the family. Taking care of animals and her own children, besides family chores, is a huge burden on her shoulders. It will be good if these animals can be taken out of these households.”

World Bank and PoCRA Lock-In

Climate Resilience is a funny word. It appears everywhere and has now been abused enough to mean nothing.

Take the case of 2017 World Bank funded PoCRA project in the state of Maharashtra. In paper, it was supposed to provide climate resilience to farmers. In reality, what happened was the complete opposite of resilience.

There is a term in systems thinking for what PoCRA was creating: lock-in. Once farmers plant orchards, they cannot adapt to drought by reducing their water use. The trees must be watered or they die. The investment must be protected or it is lost. Flexibility—the very essence of adaptive capacity—is surrendered.

In a region where rainfall varies wildly from year to year, this is the opposite of resilience. A resilient farmer in Marathwada should be able to intensify in good years and pull back in bad ones. Plant more wheat when the rains are strong; plant less when they’re weak. This is how dryland farmers have survived for centuries.

PoCRA was dismantling this flexibility. By subsidizing orchards, it was encouraging farmers to make twenty-year bets on water availability in a landscape where next year’s rainfall is unknowable.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System.

Post-Facto: Sheriff Babu introduced me to Hydraulic Memory Audit:

Before financing a 20-year asset, we must audit the Soil's Hydraulic Memory (using historical SAR data, not just rainfall). If the sub-surface soil shows a history of holding moisture during dry spells -> Plant the Orchard. If the soil physics shows rapid dry-down -> Keep the flexibility. Resilience is aligning the Crop's Inertia with the Soil's Inertia.

Here is a live Hydraulic Memory Audit from our Maharashtra cluster (Asset ID: B2, Banana, Clay).

We tracked the Radar Dry-Down Curve (Dielectric Decay) following the Oct '24 post-monsoon rains. THE FORENSIC DATA: 📉 Regional Baseline: Lost moisture signal in 7 Days (Steep Slope = Low Memory). 📈 Asset B2 (Clay): Retained root-zone moisture for 22 Days (Flat Slope = High Memory). THE VERDICT: [APPROVED] Because the Soil's Inertia (22-day buffer) matches the Crop's thirst, we validated the "Lock-in" for this 12-month Banana asset.

If this curve had tracked the regional baseline (7 days), we would have rejected the Orchard and forced the farmer to stick to adaptive seasonal Maize. Financing a long-term asset without auditing the soil's 'RAM' isn't lending. It's gambling.

Are Small farmers the Future of AI? Surely You Must Be Joking Mr. Nilekani

Ofcourse, it doesn't make sense to critique reels. But is it just me who is finding this AI Kool-Aid: "Small farmers is the future of AI" total BS?

With all due respects to the gentlemen Nandan Nilekani and Jeff Rowe, and I have great regard for Nandan for driving the DPI revolution in India, I find this totally disingenuous.

On one end there is no money in small holding farmer. And on the other end, we are vastly under-estimating how AI is such a deflationary force. I agree with Michael Burry when he recently said that AI is "deflationary for productivity spend. And that productivity gained is likely to be shared by all competitors."

With already existing slim margins, this will further commoditize the playing field. Much like lab-grown meat has made farm-grown, free-range meat premium, I see AI accelerating the focus on fundamental value creation in agriculture - focusing on growing food that is nutrient dense through deep investments in regenerative agriculture.

As I've said before, we have enough of digital infrastructure. Real physical infrastructure and the ability to take risk is the real bottleneck in Indian Agriculture.

AI definitely has a lot of potential. If it can help farmers select cheapest inputs for starters, I'll be happy. But right now most AI efforts are at agri input value chain disintermediation. Because agri-input sector is where the money is, all efforts are being built to new age platforms that can help agri-input manufacturers squeeze out more margins from the channel and supply chain.

In the recent budget, Nirmala Seetharaman proposed Bharat Vistaar - "a multilingual AI tool that shall integrate the AgriStack portals and the ICAR package on agricultural practices with AI systems." . As someone who has worked on DPI ecosystem, the real challenge is not technical. It is institutional.

We don't have yet institutions that can come together and build a DPI ecosystem layer with the right amount of skin in the game for farmers. As such, advisory platforms have been commoditized. There is no value in building yet another advisory tool.

And private organisations are not keen on driving this. Why would they commoditize their margins? It's high time we have a more honest conversation on what are the real challenges in agriculture and what we ought to focus on.

Can Bamboo Unlock Wealth for Indian Farmers?

Despite all the enthusiastic chatter around National Bamboo Mission, why do farmers still get penalized for growing bamboo? Can we take a look at Maharashtra’s Bamboo Policy? Why is bamboo stuck in a 90-year old colonial hangover? What are the three unlocks that can make National bamboo policy work?

Dr. P.N. Rao has been growing bamboo in Sangareddy district for close to eight years. He has two varieties on his farm — Balcooa (Beema) and Tulda. Few weeks ago, he began harvesting the Beema variety and dispatched one lorry of poles to Markapuram in Prakasham district, Andhra Pradesh. He did everything by the book: eWay Bill, GST copy, farmer details establishing that the bamboo was grown on private agricultural land.

The Forest Range Officer at Vijay Puri South, Nagarjuna Sagar, stopped the vehicle

Bamboo, the officer said, is a forest species. Permission is required. Dr. Rao spent the morning trying to convince him otherwise, citing the 2017 amendment to the Indian Forest Act that reclassified bamboo grown on non-forest land as agricultural produce — no longer a tree, no longer requiring transit permits.

His lorry sat stuck at a forest check post, eight years after Parliament declared bamboo free to move. Despite all talk and chatter around National Bamboo Mission, why do farmers like Dr. Rao still get penalized for growing bamboo?

Meanwhile, earlier in December, Maharashtra did something remarkable.

Under its new Bamboo Industry Policy, all thermal power plants in the state must now blend five to seven percent bamboo biomass with coal.

Here is why this is an important ruling. When a farmer grows bamboo, only about half the plant — the straight middle section — fetches a premium from furniture or agarbatti makers. The crooked bottom, thin top, knots, and leaves are waste, burned or left to rot. A farmer invests a hundred percent of effort and gets paid for fifty percent of the plant. This has been the silent killer of bamboo farming’s economic viability.

Maharashtra’s mandate changes this.

Thermal power plants do not care if bamboo is crooked or knotty. They need combustible biomass. With 25,000-plus megawatts of thermal capacity, the mandate creates millions of tonnes of annual demand — specifically for the ugly stuff nobody else wants. The farmer now sells prime cuts to furniture factories and pelletizes the scrap for power plants. A hundred percent of the crop is monetized.

The state has backed this with ₹1,534 crore for the first five years and ₹11,797 crore over two decades, building industrial clusters, FPOs, and MSME support across bamboo-rich districts like Gadchiroli and Chandrapur.

What good is demand-side activation when the supply-side regulatory foundation remains broken?

Under the Indian Forest Act of 1927, bamboo was classified as a tree for ninety years — requiring felling permits, transit permits, and royalty even on private land. For a plant that is botanically a grass and must be harvested annually to stay productive, this was absurd.

The Centre tried to fix it.

Between 2013 and 2017, the Ministry of Environment issued ten separate advisories urging states to relax bamboo regulations. Then came the 2017 Parliamentary amendment removing bamboo from the definition of “tree.” Then the Environment Minister personally wrote to every Chief Minister asking them to amend their state laws. A meeting of all Principal Chief Conservators of Forests followed, with a deadline of January 2018.

Eight years later, a forest range officer in Telangana still stops a lorry because, in the rules he operates under, bamboo remains a forest species. The Centre deregulated. Many states never fully followed through — their Forest Acts unamended, their check posts unreformed, their operating procedures unchanged.

For a national bamboo policy to work, three things must happen simultaneously.

First, complete the regulatory reform. Publish a state-by-state compliance scorecard — who has amended their acts, removed transit permits, exempted royalty. Name and shame. Make the Pan India Transit Permit legally enforceable, not advisory. Integrate bamboo into e-NAM as a regular agricultural commodity.

Second, take Maharashtra’s demand logic national. A three percent biomass blending mandate across India’s 205 gigawatts of coal capacity would transform the crop’s economics everywhere, not just in one state. Add government procurement mandates for bamboo in public construction and packaging.

Third, build sustainability guardrails before it is too late.

The carbon neutrality claim for bamboo biomass holds only with local processing and short transport chains. Mandate life-cycle assessments. Large-scale bamboo demand will incentivize monoculture plantations, carrying real risks of biodiversity loss, pest vulnerability, and the biological time bomb of gregarious flowering, where an entire species flowers and dies simultaneously across vast areas.

Require species diversification. Promote bamboo within agroforestry systems, not as standalone monoculture. Direct expansion toward degraded lands. And ensure the infrastructure being built around coal plants is fungible enough to survive when those plants eventually shut down. After all, we still have to phase out coal.

Maharashtra has shown what is possible when a government thinks in creating demand cycles. The challenge for the rest of India is twofold: Build the demand and fix the foundation.

Reflections from Prakritika Event

When I asked Ishteyaque Ahmad what spurred him and the Regenerative Bihar team to organize Prakritika event, Ishteyaque ji said something profound: We want to make farmers learn to engage as equals with the market in their own terms. And what an event it turned out to be.

Over the past few months, I have been attending only farmer-led agritech events and happily missing the rest.

And if you've attended them, you would know. Farmer events have a different air about them. The air is placid, there are lots of amazing food around and the conversations are far more democratic and happen in a circle.

I often tell this to event organizers: If you are serious about sustainability, you have to design events where people sit in a circle. You cant talk about sustainability in a podium where some wise person will pontificate and the rest will listen. Sustainability emerges when folks come together and reflect on the predicament everyone has willy-nilly contributed towards.

I had gone to Prakritika to build relationships so that one day Patna Agripreneurs Retreat could happen there. One of the highlights of the event was listening to Subhadra Tai speak beautifully about the eco-feminism view that underpins the true regenerative vision of agriculture and hear Rahul Yaduka and Eklavya Prasad share the structural challenges that underpin recurring Bihar floods.

This was my first trip to Bihar and it deeply affected me. I heard a lot of anguish about how Biharis feel when their very identity becomes a curse word, when they migrate to different states.

From the 1857 revolt to the final push in 1942, Bihar frequently served as the laboratory of Indian resistance, testing methods of struggle like Satyagraha that would later be applied nationally. Bihar is the birthplace of the Gandhian era in Indian politics. While the Congress fought for political freedom, Bihar became the epicenter of the economic freedom struggle for farmers.

How did we end up with this affairs where Bihar became the eye sore of our nation?

While Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh are entering demographic decline with aging populations and falling fertility rates, Bihar sits on India's youngest population base.

The road to Viksit Bharat runs through Bihar.

I hope to organize my first agripreneurs retreat in Bihar soon and do my bit for this beautiful state and the lovely people I met in this state. Let's see!

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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A serial entrepreneur whose journey spans three very different ventures—a dotcom-era CRM startup, a high-security number plate manufacturing business, and then 24 Mantra Organic—India's pioneering organic food brand. He is also the founder of the Association of Indian Organic (AIOI) Industry which aims to work towards building a USD 10 billion Indian Organic Industry by 2030.

Since there were a lot of chatter post the ITC acquisition of 24 Mantra Organic, I decided to side-step that narrow sliver and document his entrepreneurial journey, warts and all, especially for the second and third-generation organic food entrepreneurs.

This is a deeply personal conversation.

Raj's entrepreneurial convictions weren't born in a business school classroom or a VC pitch meeting. They were seeded watching women farm workers sing folk songs during rice transplanting in his village near Nagarjuna Sagar, sharpened by witnessing farmer suicides in the early 1990s while selling fertilizers at EID Parry, and hardened by his father's cancer diagnosis in 1999.

Raj Seelam is a man who doesn’t mince words and he dropped some powerful truth bombs that stir the status quo’s hornet nest. He also provided a lot of refreshing clarity on some of the vexing problems that afflicts the organic food ecosystem in India. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited takeaway from the conversation for those who don’t have the patience to go into the greyness and nuance we explored in the conversation. Always remember: The Map is not the Territory.

Venky Ramachandran: Raj, if we could start from the very beginning—your village, your childhood, your first brush with farming.

Raj Seelam: My village is about 100 kilometres from Hyderabad, on the way to Nagarjuna Sagar. We don’t get water from Nagarjuna Sagar other than for drinking in the recent past. We come from a drought-prone area—average rainfall of about 530mm, and we hardly get two rainfalls post-monsoons. Life is tough.

We grew up in Hyderabad for education, but we’d always go back to the village during holidays. We actually looked forward to it. There’s where the fun was, with family, with grandparents.

My fondest memories are of summer holidays when harvesting would happen. My father would make sure we went to the field, supervised the harvesting. It was very labor-intensive those days. I’d go in the morning, get lunch to the farm, and be there till 6, 6:30 in the evening. And transplanting—my memories are of all these women workers singing folk songs. That was fun. And of course, no water bottles—you’d drink directly from the well.

Dusshera would always coincide with the harvesting of dryland crops—that’s why it’s more popular in Telangana. People have some money, or expect some money shortly. Sankranti was more a coastal Andhra festival, because of irrigated agriculture. Telangana was rain-fed, not much money, but whatever little people had, they’d always buy new clothes.

Venky Ramachandran: You never had the early inkling that you’d work in the agriculture sector?

Raj Seelam: My father always encouraged us to move away from farming, saying it’s very difficult to have a good standard of living. We weren’t small farmers—from our context, we were reasonably well-off. But you still couldn’t afford any of the luxuries a city offers. Every good meal a day, a nice house to sleep in—that’s it. Not much savings.

But I was still very much interested in agriculture. I did my graduation in agriculture, then went to IIM Ahmedabad for an MBA. There, I chose the agribusiness specialization. About 25 of us were in it, and except 2 or 3, everyone took up other jobs. I was one of the very few who stuck to agriculture.

Venky Ramachandran: And then from campus, you joined EID Parry?

Raj Seelam: That was a bit of an odd choice. It was the lowest-paying salary—no one wanted to join, given the pay. But I read this article in Business India about a 200-year-old company on the verge of collapse that turned around. I’d done my summer training with some multinationals, and I didn’t find it exciting—everything is set, there’s nothing much for you to do other than follow a set process.

I said, this must be fun. That was my first and last job—from 1988 to 2000. Fertiliser, pesticide, and seeds. My last assignment was with the seeds business, where we converted our seed business into a joint venture with Monsanto.

Venky Ramachandran: Being in the agri-input industry and then developing a conviction for organic—that’s an unusual transition. People in agri-input companies typically dismiss organic as a fad.

Raj Seelam: There were what I call moments of truth. The first was in the early 1990s, working with farmers. Farmer suicides had started happening. They’d borrow money for fertilizer, not be able to repay. A farmer might have a good season once in four years, average once in four years, and two bad years. When you have a good season, prices aren’t there. Borrowing money for fertilizer and pesticides makes it worse. And the practices of agri companies aren’t great—they just want to sell at any cost, not really provide solutions.

Coming from a farming family and a certain value system, I said I should do something about it whenever I get the chance.

The second moment was practically seeing pesticide being used—farmers dipping produce in pesticide before sending it to market because people didn’t want insects. That’s when I stopped eating a lot of things—cabbage, cauliflower, quite a few things. That’s when I made my first note: I should do something about this.

The third nail was my father’s cancer diagnosis in 1999. When I was researching treatment options, I realized the incidence of cancer had gone up quite high—better detection, yes, but also food, lifestyle, pollution.

And fourth—my father would use half the dose of fertilizer, grow greens, hardly use one round of pesticide, and still get the best yield in a 100–150 kilometre radius. That convinced me that doing away with fertilizer and pesticides is definitely possible.

Venky Ramachandran: Take us through the entrepreneurial ventures before 24 Mantra Organic.

Raj Seelam: My first venture was iwantareply.com—a third-party customer portal with a few friends. We developed the portal, then the dotcom bust happened. No one was willing to fund us. We pivoted to CRM software, implemented it for a Dubai radio channel. Then 9/11 happened—we never got paid. We tried consulting, then realised knowledge doesn’t pay. People take your ideas but don’t pay for it.

Then this thing about high-security number plates came up. We tied up with a German partner. One competitor had tried to trademark the Ashoka emblem—we brought it to the government’s notice, they cleaned it up. We bid in 15 states, set up the factory. I had no knowledge about engineering, but we were the first company to get all approvals from the Automotive Research Association of India.

But these were government projects, and at some point, you have to compromise. Payoffs and other things—my value system didn’t agree with it. I convinced my partners and we sold the business. We were the only guys who made money in that business. That was in 2003.

Venky Ramachandran: And the organic idea had been simmering since 1992.

Raj Seelam: It was always at the back of my mind. When I exited, that was the first time I had my money—because my entrepreneurial journey started with about 1.5 lakh rupees, my gratuity savings from Parry. That went off in the first business. Second business, we managed somehow.

One thing I learned: learning is continuous, you don’t have to get stuck in one field. I’d gone from agri-inputs to software to light engineering. So I had this money, and I was exploring options, but organic was always pulling me.

All my research told me I’d be a fool to start anything connected with organic. No one knew what organic was, and apparently no one cared. But I had this gut feeling—incomes were increasing, people were looking for healthier options. We might be a little early, but not too early.

One of the learnings from my first business: staying power. If you’re too early and the market takes time to mature, and you don’t have the money, you lose out.

And I learned from watching Monsanto—pioneers don’t always succeed or make money. They might create impact, but a lot of missteps and a little arrogance can undo them. I didn’t want to be another dinosaur.

That’s why I didn’t want partners. I knew it was a long shot. I didn’t want anyone to lose their money. Let me begin with my own thing—whatever I earned, I reinvest it back. We incorporated the company in March 2004.

Venky Ramachandran: What was the initial market hypothesis?

Raj Seelam: I spent about a year going around—meeting pioneering farmers like Nammalvar, visiting farms in Gujarat, going abroad, visiting small organic stores in Chennai and Bombay.

Two fundamental realisations emerged. First, availability has to be continuous—otherwise, why would a customer switch? Second, people wanted to know that if they choose to switch, they can fully switch or substantially switch. So having a wide range of products became important.

From the farmer side, it made sense too—a farmer produces multiple things. If you say you’ll only buy one thing, why would they do organic for you?

From day one, we had about 120-130 products from farmers already growing organic.

My goals were threefold, very clear, written down as my vision statement before starting the company: create better livelihoods for farmers, ensure pure and unadulterated food, and do a little bit for the ecology.

Now, one challenge with organic is that pesticides—you can’t see them, can’t feel them. You can’t get any immediate benefit from consuming organic. People have to consume for a long time before they realise the difference. So we focused on culinary experience—taste, bite, mouthfeel, aroma.

We realised that a lot of newer varieties give good yield but from a sensory experience, they’re not great. So we went back, identified old varieties. In many cases, we had to find retired breeders, get seed from them, multiply, and give it back to farmers.

That created stickiness. I’ll give one example—we were one of the first companies to do brown rice. Customers came from us, then supermarkets started offering cheaper brown rice. For a couple of months, we lost those customers. Then they started coming back, saying: “We tried, but this is something different. The taste is not the same, the cooking is not the same.”

Venky Ramachandran: Working capital has been a perennial challenge. Most of your capital went into managing inventory rather than into losses.

Raj Seelam: That’s right. We had to buy everything, stock for the entire year, and sell as and when. Most investors don’t want to invest in ventures where working capital is very high—it affects your free cash flows.

Today the system is more mature. We work with companies like Star Agri for storing material. We experimented with warehouse receipt systems—that worked well, but RBI intervened because of fraud elsewhere and restricted banks from doing it.

One interesting thing we tried: some farmers said they didn’t want money immediately. They wanted it over a period of time at a higher price, and we worked that out.

For new organic entrepreneurs, my advice: if you’re profitable, raising working capital from banks is easier. If not, you’re pushed to NBFCs at 17-18% interest, which doesn’t work. So develop products where the raw material cost is a smaller percentage. And build profitability first.

Venky Ramachandran: We now have second-generation organic players like Two Brothers Organic who’ve raised venture capital and are putting out plans to reach 1000 crore.

Raj Seelam: Today, if you look at Two Brothers, most of their products are not organic. They give an impression of organic, but they’re not really organic. So obviously they don’t need to have this kind of working capital pressure. That’s the ecosystem challenge—the certification system seems broken.

Venky Ramachandran: Amul has democratized the organic space with significantly lower prices. How do you see that?

Raj Seelam: Amul cuts marketing costs through sheer distribution power. They source mostly from intermediaries—not direct farming. And they’re not looking at making money from this right now, perhaps even in the future, given government pressure.

That puts private entrepreneurs at a disadvantage—they need ROI for investors. But if price were the only factor, everyone should have disappeared by now. Amul has been in the market 5-6 years. Obviously they’re facing sourcing challenges too—they can’t get enough quantities. Unless you invest in farmers and farming, this is not scalable. Today the game is more about a document and a test report.

Venky Ramachandran: The organic certification system has become incredibly complex. Process-based certification is the premise, but it’s been taken for a ride. If you had a whiteboard to reimagine this from first principles, what would you do?

Raj Seelam: Today, if I restart, I would not even get into certification. I would set up my own process—whether it’s a testing system or whatever. In first principles terms, it’s about soil, it’s about biodiversity. Focus on that. Create a brand, and say this is what it is. Let consumers check and verify.

The certification system has become a nightmare. For every fraud they discover, they create 10 new rules. It exponentially multiplies. People who want to comply find it a nightmare. People who don’t want to comply still manage.

I think it’s time we move beyond labels. Organic, natural farming, PGS, residue-free—all these certifications. Focus on the basics. Soil and biodiversity. If you do that right, you can easily avoid pesticides, and your produce will be healthier in nutritional values.

Any certification system is primarily there to build trust. I’m not sure, given the complexity in this country, how easy that will be. One way is to go back to the drawing board, make it very simple, and make penalties very heavy for violators. But it has to be simple enough for farmers to understand. It shouldn’t require a big company to take it up.

Venky Ramachandran: You started the Association of Indian Organic, and I saw the goal is to reach about $10 billion by 2030 for the entire industry. What is the kind of ecosystem work you are attempting to do there?

Raj Seelam: We started the Association in 2014-15. That was a time when organic was growing 15-16%—around when Sikkim was declared an organic state. But then came 2020, and the issue with the EU happened. The government didn’t manage it properly—it was more about certification agencies and their supervision systems, not individual companies.

The last five years since 2020 have been only about battling heavy regulation. I couldn’t talk about building the market, or farmers, or anything. Five years just gone waste.

Bureaucrats, for every issue, try to make it more complicated. More rules. It’s never-ending. And all said and done, no system is going to be perfect. If you get 70-80% right, it’s there—let consumers choose.

Venky Ramachandran: What’s next for Raj Seelam—the 4.0 thesis?

Raj Seelam: A few things we’re working on. One is our Purity Prakruti retail stores—bringing down the cost of products to consumers, making it D2C first. We’re building the tech stack now, should launch in a month or two.

I’ve been experimenting with organic eggs. And I’m seriously interested in whether we can create a platform for scaling up innovative agritech technologies. A lot of solutions exist but none can scale because of various reasons.

Fourth, we’re setting up an R&D centre for nutrition products—both premium and accessible to the bottom of the pyramid.

But the whole thing is still about how we create social impact—whether at the farming level or the consumer level. Let’s see how many of these go from ideas to products or businesses.

Venky Ramachandran: Any final message?

Raj Seelam: You’re doing a great job of connecting everyone, and then pushing the agenda. Please do keep it up.

So, what do you think?

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