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.

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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?

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 -5th February 2026

1/ Is “Two Brothers Organic” staring 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?

2/ The Rain Shadow of India-EU deal

What happens when there are no protections for key agricultural sectors? What if India had allowed New Zealand dairy to enter the Indian dairy sector, much like Sri Lanka did? Can we run a thought experiment to understand the rain shadow-side of India-EU deal ? How does Amul compare with Fonterra? Can we contextualize these thought experiments with climate realities from CEEW survey on Indian Dairy?

3/ Evaluating the Impact of World Bank’s PoCRA (Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture

In 2017, the World Bank approved Maharashtra's Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture (PoCRA)—a $600 million intervention targeting the state's most drought-vulnerable districts. Seven years later, the World Bank’s Implementation Completion Report awarded the project an “overall satisfactory” rating. Pooja Prasad’s Impact Analysis of the project in a peer-reviewed journal specializing in water governance reveals something far more troubling: PoCRA may have actually reduced climate resilience while exacerbating the very inequities it claimed to address.

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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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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DPI for Indian Agriculture: Paper Review

A new white paper argues that better architecture will drive adoption of digital public infrastructure in India. How do we address the DPI adoption challenge in the Indian context when the constraint is institutional and not technical?

This paper—produced by Co-Develop, Gates Foundation, The World Bank , Vital Wave, and OpenAgriNet—advocates for a layered “building blocks” approach to digital agriculture: foundational DPI (identity, payments, data exchange) complemented by sector-specific blocks (farmer registries, crop registries, data standards, AI assets).

Their promise is seductive. Who doesn’t want to reduce fragmentation, enable interoperability, unlock innovation?

The paper places heavy reliance on Registries (Farmer, Plot, Crop) as the Sector-Specific Building Blocks. It cites AgriStack and the Digital Crop Survey as successes where foundational DPI (Aadhaar) links to land records to create a "Farmer ID."

The paper exhibits classic technology determinism: build the infrastructure, and good things follow. But consider the sequence in India.

Aadhaar existed since 2009. UPI scaled from 2016. PM-KISAN (direct transfers) was launched around 2019. AgriStack was announced during 2021. As of December 2024, only 3.7 million farmer IDs were created while the goal was to reach 60 million by end-2025.

Why the slow uptake despite “mature” foundational DPI? Because the problem was never primarily technical. The paper acknowledges this obliquely, but then proceeds as if better architecture will solve political problems.

More in a recent subscriber-only post at Krishi.System.

Will Indian Agriculture No Longer No Be a State Subject?

When true policy reforms for Viksit Bharat 2047 demand rhythm and balance in Centre-state and inter-state coordination, can we get our hands together and think more strategically for the future?

The Samudra Manthan teaches us that the nectar of immortality was not obtained by one side overpowering the other, but by a grueling, synchronized effort involving both.

NITI Aayog’s current policy gameplay may achieve the technical efficiency required to churn the Amrit of a $30 trillion economy, but it risks hollowing out the federal spirit that holds India together.

To truly reform Indian agriculture, the Centre must loosen the digital noose and allow States to pull their weight. Only when the tension on the rope is equal, and the rhythm is shared, as the puranas tell us, will the ocean yield its treasures.

How did Hosachiguru thrive while Growpital capitulated?

How did Hosachiguru thrive while Growpital capitulated? On the surface, there are plenty of similarities between asset-light Growpital and asset-heavy Hosachiguru.

Both promise the same dream: “Be a farmer without the sweat”.

And yet while Growpital is stuck in regulatory gridlock, Hosachiguru has grown significantly. What did Growpital do which Hosachiguru didn’t and vice-versa? How did Hosachiguru evolve its business model and deal with the same risks which Growpital encountered differently? How is Hosachiguru different from Organo Eco Habitats?

Now is a great time to sell the urban dream of becoming a farmer without a sweat. Believe it or not. You can also now own a cow without managing it.

I’ve been tracking agri-investment tech players for quite sometime. Keeping aside my fundamental discomfort of severing land’s agrarian roots by making it a real-estate product, it’s fascinating to see how this space is spreading its tentacles from managed farming to real estate to agri-tourism, crafting a niche in building elite community/weekend life real-estate projects for India 1 market.

When farm land gets priced beyond a point, it becomes a real-estate product. When farmers are exiting agriculture, should we be, atleast, happy that through expensive real-estate deals, urbanites could get to rediscover their connection with land and soil?

Although I’ve been tracking Hosachiguru for a while, I realized I hadn’t written about them, especially while watching their influencer collaboration video advertorial with gen.E.

Although you could argue that comparing Growpital with Hosachiguru is the case of apples and oranges, it is fascinating to contrast their divergent journeys.

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

My Agritech Expectations for Union Budget 2026

Let’s be honest.

Budget expectations hardly move the needle for farmers. Except for thought leadership theater, where wish lists become subtle acknowledgement of what was lobbied for in Krishi Bhavan chambers, budget wish lists keep piling without creating a dent in the livelihoods of farmers.

Smallholder Farming continues to be unviable for smallholding farmers. Governments ensure that this charade continues for the sake of political brownie points through subsidies to compensate the unacknowledged taxes farmers pay by being at the receiving end of a misguided policy that favour consumer inflation over farmer incomes. Of course, governments are fully aware of the leakages that ensues and talk of having no choice, but to subsidize a broken farming system. You could argue that if not for government support, farmers would have long discontinued farming.

Conversely, by not pulling out the plug, you could argue that we’ve managed to create sustainable poverty that churns out disenchantment year after year, even while soil health becomes alarming enough that it is eventually pulling the plug out from farming.

Farmers are better off if they refuse any form of support from governments. Whenever I meet individual farmers, I tell them to build direct relationship with consumers. Let consumers discover that their health is in farmers’ hands. Let farmers discover that their economic needs are better met by them being farmers.

That said, where can governments really help? Perhaps, collectively speaking in supporting farmers transition towards regenerative farming practices. When you contrast how much governments support conventional farming systems with regenerative farming systems, you discover the yawning chasm in terms of what governments can do to ensure that the next generation continues to do farming.

With that prologue in place, my top expectations from this year’s Budget are the following:

1) Currently, a massive chunk of ICAR/State Ag University budgets goes toward salaries and pensions, leaving little for actual research. Allocate 1% of agricultural GDP (approximately ₹30,000 crore) to agricultural R&D, with a clear mandate that at least 40% goes toward frontier technologies including AI-driven crop advisory systems that reduce input costs, genomics for crop improvement, and bio-input development. Alternatively, a matching-grant framework where government funds match private investment in high-priority areas like climate-resilient seeds or precision farm tools could also be explored.

2) A dedicated ₹2,000 crore fund for operationalizing forest and tribal livelihood corridors that link traditional knowledge holders (forest communities) with formal AYUSH and nutraceutical value chains, backed by streamlined single-window clearances.

3) BRCs currently struggle because they are treated as government extensions rather than viable business units. Transform BRCs into ‘Bio-Economy Hubs’ run by FPOs/Rural Entrepreneurs with a standardized, fast-track quality certification process (Bureau of Indian Standards aligned). Allow them to plug directly into the fertilizer subsidy ecosystem so that bio-inputs get the same price-support visibility as chemical fertilizers.

4) Legalize and formalize land leasing through a model law that states can adopt, building on NITI Aayog’s 2016 recommendations. Provide fiscal incentives for FPO-based collective farming models that can achieve operational scale without changing ownership.

5) Convert 25% of the urea subsidy (approximately ₹30,000 crore) into a “Soil Health Improvement Grant” that states can access only if they demonstrate measurable improvements in balanced fertilizer use ratios. Mandate digital Soil Health Cards integrated with Point-of-Sale fertilizer systems, or alternatively create Soil-Health Wallets, so that recommendations can translate into actual purchase behavior.

6) Create a specialized credit guarantee fund for FPOs that want to buy assets (drones, grading machines, cold storage infra, pack house) rather than just inputs (seeds/fertilizers)

What do you think? Does it make sense? What would you add?

Patna Agripreneurs Meetup

Excited to host my first Agripreneurs Meetup in Patna. Do help me spread the word. Why do I host Agripreneurs Meetup?

I deeply care about Indian Agriculture and I've discovered that meetups are a great way to build mycorrhizal networks that bind the agripreneurs towards deeper collaboration, impact and success.

When Agripreneurs come together in KrishidotSystem ecosystem, a lot of possibilities emerge: Fellow Agripreneurs discover collaborations, partnerships. Joint Ventures are born. And more importantly friendships are born.

Date: 6th February 2026 | Time: 7 PM - 9 PM IST | Venue: TOKOR, Pataliputra Colony | RSVP

P.S. While the event is free and will always remain free, you are most welcome to support me in organizing agripreneur meetups across the country.

Musings on Republic Day

Whenever I think of Republic Day, I am reminded of my dear mentor T.S. Ananthu who transformed how I looked at the very idea of "Republic".

I found this picture from the 1962 archives of IIT Madras when T.S.Ananthu received a prize from Dr. P. Subbarayan (Minister for Transport and Communication). History might not remember Dr. P. Subbarayan. But I have a strong feeling. History , especially the kind where change makers recollect history to drive the engine of progress, will definitely remember T.S. Ananthu.

Ananthu did his B. Tech. (Electrical Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1965. After completing a Master’s Degree from Stanford University, he worked for the Xerox Corporation for a while before returning to India in 1969.

In Delhi, he worked for IBM for some time before setting up a software company. Ananthu had always been interested in social causes and this drew him to the J.P.Movement. In 1976, he joined the Gandhi Peace Foundation, where he worked for 14 years before moving to Navadarshanam.

Navadarshanam was the place of my dreams. It was the first place where I met living Gandhians in oozing flesh and blood. It was the first place where I saw that large dreams can be quietly manifested. I had gone there when I was 25. I was a confused soul searching for spiritual in the mundane and mundane in the spiritual.

Even though I was doing MBA, I wasn't content with its curriculum. I decided that my second year dissertation would focus on quantum mechanics and its parallels with modern management.

There was just one problem. I had no training in physics. And so when Ananthu TS announced a 10 day course in quantum mechanics, I rushed there and signed up.

I don't know if the ritual is still alive. For few years, Navadarshanam celebrated its annual day on 26th January. And on each republic day, T.S. Ananthu asked us fundamental questions of being a part of a republic. The conversations I had with him stir deeply within me.

What does republic mean ? A republic is a form of government where the state is considered a "public matter" (res publica), sovereignty rests with the people, and the head of state is an elected official rather than a monarch.

Who decides the "public matter" ? What does sovereignty mean? Do we the people have sovereignty ? Who decides the air we breathe? Who decides the quality of the soil our food grows in? Who decides the quality of water we drink and swim in?

When you ponder on these questions, you discover that Republic day is a gentle reminder that we are still a nation that is work in progress. We have work cut out in front of us. Until our children take over the nation building, we have to strengthen the foundations of res publica.

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.🙏

💗 If you like “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

I am not exaggerating one bit.

Peel the skin of each of 2025/2026 policy reforms - VB-G RAM G Act, Seeds Bill, Pesticides Management Bill 2025, National Cooperation Policy and National Policy on Agricultural Marketing. If you pay attention to the forest instead of the trees, you might perhaps listen to the quiet, beating heart of this provocative question.

Of course, constitutionally speaking, Agriculture is a State subject (Entry 14, List II in Seventh Schedule).

But here is the thing.

The bitter experience of the 2023 Farm Law Repeal taught the current Union Govt an important lesson. Legislative force generates resistance that reinforces status quo. And so, if the Union Government is hungry for reforms, especially with Modi quietly recognizing that he is perhaps in his last term, what should they do? How can the Union government legislate without stepping on States’ constitutional toes?

Beneath the slew of policy reforms, I see a sophisticated policy gameplay.

Niti Aayog builds the "software" (Model Acts, Policy Frameworks, and Digital Platforms) for States. And thanks to centralization of taxes, populist spending packages and historical burdens, the States’ fiscal predicament forces them to "install" them, leaving them with less freedom of choice to take decisions on important State subjects (such as seeds)

What fiscal conditions are we talking about? Take the case of States like Punjab, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh that have high debt-to-GSDP ratio. Each of these states cannot afford to say no to Central funds. States like West Bengal and Telangana that tried to exercise "Freedom of Choice" and faced immediate fiscal blockade. In contrast, states like Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh aligned quickly to maximize fiscal intake. 

Instead of forcing laws on States, NITI Aayog drafts Model Acts and policy frameworks. These serve as blueprints that States can voluntarily adopt, adapt (as it happened during the case of Farm Laws in states like Rajasthan), or even ignore (as it happened in the case of West Bengal when the state refused to receive funds from PM-Kisan for a brief period)

To encourage States to install this "software" and implement reforms, NITI Aayog creates indices and ranking systems that measure States' performance on various parameters.

Composite Water Management Index | Aspirational District Blocks Program | AMFFRI (Agricultural Marketing and Farmer Friendly Reforms Index). There are plenty of such indices Niti Aayog has been playing with for quite some time.

This naming and shaming (and conversely naming and faming) approach through indices creates peer pressure among Chief Ministers and their bureaucracy to improve their state's ranking.

Now let’s examine each of the policy reform in detail to observe this gameplay.

Take the case of VB-G RAM G Act:

The Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, passed in December 2025, subtly shifts power from the State Capital to the Gram Panchayat, bypassing the middleman of state bureaucracy. By mandating that plans must be integrated with PM Gati Shakti, the Centre forces local Panchayats to adopt central digital standards (Geo-tagging/real-time dashboards) to get funds. States that don't digitize effectively choke their own funding pipelines.

Or take the case of Seeds Bill:

The Seeds Bill creates central registration requirements, central seed committees, and notably proposes to recognize 'any organization established in territory outside India, for conducting trials to assess the Value for Cultivation and Use', bypassing state-level agricultural institutions entirely.

The Centre doesn't need to get into legislative conflict with States to remove trade barriers. By digitizing the seed itself, the Centre creates a "One Nation, One Seed" market. A bag of seeds approved in Telangana can be verified in Punjab instantly. It renders state-level protectionism obsolete through technology.

Or Take the case of Pesticides Management Bill 2025:

Section 2 explicitly brings the regulation of the pesticide industry under the Union Government, citing public interest. This centralization aims to ensure uniform standards while state governments have not been provided with regulatory powers to act on prohibition of pesticides.

It includes a "deemed registration" clause. If not decided in 18 months, it's deemed granted. This prevents State bureaucrats from sitting on files to extract rents. If the State is inefficient, the Centre's law automatically clears the product, forcing States to be efficient to stay relevant.

Or take the more pertinent case of National Cooperation Policy:

The Centre cannot directly legislate on State Cooperatives as it is a State Subject. The creation of the Ministry of Cooperation itself was the first centralizing move as cooperatives are constitutionally a state subject. The policy establishes three multi-state cooperative societies for exports, seed production, and branding & marketing of organic products, thereby bypassing state cooperative structures.

The 2025 Policy opens up lucrative Central sectors to State entities such as Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS).

PACS are now licensed to run retail fuel outlets (a Central subject). PACS can run generic medicine stores. PACS effectively become the digital nodes for central schemes. But here is the catch. To access these lucrative business licenses, the PACS must adopt the Model Bye-laws drafted by the Centre.

The Centre isn't forcing the Bye-laws. It is simply saying, "If you want your local cooperative to own a petrol pump (high revenue), they must adopt the new Bye-laws." This is "Cooperative Federalism" weaponized—using financial carrots to standardize governance across diverse states.

The Policy sets a target of increasing cooperative contribution to GDP by 3X by 2034. This creates a measurable metric. States are now ranked not just on “Ease of Doing Business” but on “Cooperative Vibrancy”—effectively shaming states that let their sugar or dairy cooperatives collapse due to corruption.

The cooperative sector in India has long been plagued by "Ghost Societies"—paper-only entities used for laundering funds or vote-banking. The 2025 Policy uses data transparency to trigger competition. PACS computerization funnels all cooperatives onto central digital platforms, creating a "traceability spine" the Centre controls.

Finally, Let’s take the case of National Policy on Agricultural Marketing.

The Policy explicitly proposes the creation of a "Market-Stack" or "Unified National Market Portal (UNMP)”. Just as “India Stack” (Aadhar/UPI) became the OS for finance, “Market-Stack” is the proposed OS for Agriculture. It mandates a "Federated Model" where State-level registries (Prices, Licenses, Mandi Automation) must be integrated with the Central Portal via API (Application Programming Interface).

“States /UTs those have notified such policy are required to tweak their policy framework to be by and large in consonance with the National Policy Framework to achieve the goal of making available “Best Possible Market and Price” to the farmers for their produce .” - Chapter 3: Mission of National Policy Framework

Pay attention to the language here.

It doesn't say "States should decide"; it says they must "tweak" their laws to match the Central Master Code. The Policy proposes a new governance layer in Chapter 7: An "Empowered Agricultural Marketing Reform Committee" modeled explicitly on the GST Council. The goal here is to push States to adopt a "Single Unified Trading License" valid across the country.

By modeling it on the GST Council, the Centre is signaling a move toward a "One Nation, One Market, One Tax" structure for Agriculture. Just as States lost their financial sovereignty under GST, this committee aims to erode their marketing sovereignty by standardizing fees and licenses.

Is Agriculture still a State subject? On paper, yes. But in practice, the “autonomy” of a State is shrinking, to explore the metaphor of the software further, to merely customizing the user interface, while the backend logic is increasingly controlled by the Centre.

The Centre acts as the architect, designing the blueprints and holding the purse strings. The States are becoming the contractors—free to build, but only if they follow the Union Architect’s plan.

Perhaps, as we discover, much to our chagrin, how cooperative federalism becomes coercive federalism through technology, it might help if we reflect on true meaning of cooperative federalism.

The shibboleth “Agriculture is a State Subject” is perhaps the oldest truism of Indian agriculture. Enshrined in the Constitution, it was designed to empower local governments.

But here is the thing. Enshrined autonomy can never be the same as living, dynamic autonomy.

In a country like India with 86% smallholders, there has always been a healthy tension between the Center pursuing the national agenda-involving all states, political parties and other stakeholders - and each state fulfilling its constitutional obligations on agriculture.

While the former wants to centralize agriculture, the latter is working in the opposite direction to resist the centralization of an essential state subject.

For outsiders, here is Ajay giving a good taste of the complexity we are dealing with.

“The Union Minister will soon realise that central government policy is restricted by the fact that agriculture and land are in the domain of the states; animal husbandry and fisheries where real growth is visible are separate ministries; the budgetary allocations are controlled by the Ministry of Finance; and an outdated inflation policy is dictated by the RBI.” - Ajay Vir Jakhar (Source)

Cooperative Federalism is today an utopian ideal.

As this fascinating EPW paper explores in greater detail, today, we face a strange predicament where richer states (Punjab, Haryana, Telangana, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu) are much bigger beneficiaries of subsidies compared to the poorer states.

True cooperative federalism is a matter of skin in the game with each state financing their own farmer support initiatives.

True cooperative federalism is a matter of the Union Govt providing robust public infrastructure (research and development, insurance and post-harvest infrastructure), before it rushes to provide digital public infrastructure.

True cooperative federalism is a matter of States having the freedom and responsibility to ‘discharge their constitutional obligations on agriculture’.

True cooperative federalism is a matter of States exercising responsibility and boundaries through their agricultural policies. One State’s policy cannot take a toll on the natural resources of another State.

Perhaps, a lot of water has crossed under the bridge to rediscover Cooperative federalism in the current political context. We can reimagine policy reforms better if we respect the principles of Cooperative federalism, instead of weaponizing it.

When true policy reforms for Viksit Bharat 2047 demand rhythm and balance in Centre-state and inter-state coordination, can we get our hands together and think more strategically for the future?

The Samudra Manthan teaches us that the nectar of immortality was not obtained by one side overpowering the other, but by a grueling, synchronized effort involving both.

NITI Aayog’s current policy gameplay may achieve the technical efficiency required to churn the Amrit of a $30 trillion economy, but it risks hollowing out the federal spirit that holds India together. To truly reform Indian agriculture, the Centre must loosen the digital noose and allow States to pull their weight. Only when the tension on the rope is equal, and the rhythm is shared, as the puranas tell us, will the ocean yield its treasures.

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.

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.🙏

💗 If you like “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

State of Agritech - 22nd January 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ How did Hosachiguru thrive while Growpital capitulated?

On the surface, there are plenty of similarities between asset-light Growpital and asset-heavy Hosachiguru. Both promise the same dream: “Be a farmer without the sweat”. And yet while Growpital is stuck in regulatory gridlock, Hosachiguru has grown significantly. What did Growpital do which Hosachiguru didn’t and vice-versa? How did Hosachiguru evolve its business model and deal with the same risks which Growpital encountered differently? How is Hosachiguru different from Organo?

2/ A Critique of Vital Wave’s Whitepaper, “A Digital Public Infrastructure Approach for the Agriculture Sector” based on my UKI DPI learnings and experiences

A new whitepaper argues that better architecture will drive adoption of digital public infrastructure in India. How do we address the DPI adoption challenge in the Indian context when the constraint is institutional and not technical?

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.

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?

<Subscriber-Only Post Trailers>

The Good, Bad and The Ugly Loans of Indian Agriculture

Indian banks are celebrating their cleanest balance sheets in over a decade. Agricultural NPAs tell a different story.

A banking expert recently assured me that farm sector stress is “within safe limits.” The data disagrees. Agriculture now accounts for 34.6% of all bad loans in the system. So how are both things true?

The answer involves a gold rush, a scheme called Kisan Credit Card bleeding at 14% delinquency, and a structural rot where crop loans are quietly paying for weddings and hospital bills instead of seeds and fertilizer.

Banks have found a way to meet their farm lending targets without actually betting on the farm. The system is secure. The farmer is not.

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

Shaktiman’s Strength and Achilles Heel

Shaktiman didn’t just become the World’s Largest Manufacturer of rotary tillers by assembling parts. They won by identifying the tiller as the foundational “atom” of Indian mechanization and obsessing over it.

From 7,500 units in 2007 to dominating >50% of the domestic market and exporting in 105 countries, their growth is a masterclass in economies of scale. But the real genius lies in their vertical integration.

They don’t just sell the printer; they own the ink. By manufacturing their own Boron steel blades—2 crore of them a year—they control the aftermarket and the product’s reputation.

Revenue grew from ₹562 crores to ₹1,690 crores. No external investors. No dilution. Pure bootstrapped scale. And yet, when I scanned their product portfolio, I found gears, chains, hydraulics, heat treatment and zero mentions of vision systems, inference chips, or autonomy.

In a world moving toward robotics, is being the best “farm implement” company enough?

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

Has Amul Lost Its Moorings?

Last week, I published my piece on Amul for paid subscribers and received a lot of comments and criticism.

Given that it is Amul and I deeply care about Amul and have been deeply inspired by Verghese Kurien, I decided to publish my piece outside the paywall and address few questions that came my way!

Post-Facto: I received few fascinating comments in the wake of this piece:

Dip Patel wrote, “The cooperative model is good. But it’s losing trust. In my village, 8–9 years ago we supplied ~12,000 litres of milk per day. Today, it’s barely 3,000 litres. Unclear pricing, delayed payments, zero accountability, zero transparency, weak organisational structure, and excessive hiring — all of this eats into farmer profits. When farmers don’t understand where their milk or money goes, they walk away. And this isn’t limited to one cooperative. Even cooperative banks are facing the same trust deficit.”

Sanjaykumar Gugawad wrote, “What i can foresee is corruption may increase within organisation due non- dairy procurement/ trading products. The benchmark of 85% of revenue giving back to farmer will not work here, the bye-laws to be changed for such categories, becoz 600+ products under the belt, possibility that non-dairy business may become bigger than dairy business”

Farmer Suicides of Maharashtra

When Maharashtra Minister announced in the Legislative council that Maharashtra witnessed 781 farmer suicides in the first nine months of 2025 due to loans, crop failure and excessive rainfall, it triggered an uncomfortable question: How come the state which leads agricultural innovation is also leading the suicide list?

It set off an fascinating conversation in the Agripreneurs Community I steward.

Everyone in the room agreed on one thing: Every farmer suicide is a failure of the system, regardless of how the statistics are framed. But agreement on the tragedy didn’t mean agreement on its causes.

Obviously, The data is extremely noisy. Accidental deaths and pesticide misuse sometimes get classified as suicides. Families and officials may have incentives to fit cases into compensation frameworks. None of this negates agrarian distress. It only means that raw numbers alone cannot explain causality. The crisis is real. The numbers just don’t tell us why it persists.

The Two Maharashtras

Western Maharashtra and Konkan have reliable rainfall, irrigation infrastructure, and sugar cooperatives that created not just capital but political power. Farmers there grow grapes, sugarcane, onions, tomatoes - high financial ROI ecosystems that also shapes water priorities viciously over the long run. Many are genuinely wealthy by Indian standards.

“A typical farmer in Vidarbha would expect 225 on a 100 rs spent, does labour according to that. Rest of the time he will sit on the village katta discussing while women does rest of the work. In comparison, a farmer from western Maharashtra would expect 500 to 600 for that 100 and a farmer from Punjab/Up probably 700.” - An Agripreneur Friend from Maharashtra.

Drive east to Vidarbha or Marathwada, and the picture inverts. Rain-fed agriculture. Erratic climate. Historically neglected irrigation. Crops like cotton, soy, and wheat that offer lower margins and higher volatility. Weak political leverage translated into weak public investment, which translated into continued fragility.

This is a path-dependent trap: Poor infrastructure forces farmers into risky crops, risky crops yield low surplus, low surplus means no reinvestment, and the cycle continues. Capitalist trickle-down doesn’t work when initial conditions are broken.

Beyond the Crop Failure

One of the most important insights came from ground-level experience. Farmer suicides are rarely caused by crop failure alone. They are almost always a stacked collapse—debt, especially informal loans at 24% interest or higher; alcoholism and domestic violence; poor nutrition; climate shocks; wild animal damage; caste conflicts; social isolation; easy access to lethal means like pesticides; and zero mental health infrastructure.

This pattern isn’t uniquely Indian. Data from the UK, Australia, and France show the same thing: farming is a lonely, high-stress profession everywhere. In India, it intersects with poverty, informality, and weak safety nets—and that intersection makes it lethal.

The Silent Killer

The sharpest point of agreement was about credit. Bank credit isn’t the core problem—aggregate NPAs are manageable. The real issue is exclusion. When a district gets tagged for high NPAs, banks stop lending there. Small farmers get pushed to loan sharks. And informal debt has no restructuring, no moratorium, no forgiveness—only exponential compounding.

The suicide trigger, more often than not, is credit structure failure, not agriculture failure.

Technology Isn’t the Bottleneck

I hope Bill Gates isn’t reading this commentary on farmer suicides and is getting feverishly excited to pitch technology as a fundamental answer to smallholders’ problems.

Let’s be clear. Technology exists.

Seeds, irrigation, weather forecasting, crop insurance—all of it is available. But adoption is uneven. Risk remains individualized. Rewards are market-driven, not survival-driven. Mono-cropping for markets without buffers forces farmers to gamble with their lives.

The problem isn’t lack of innovation. It’s who bears the risk.

Whither Land Reform?

Individual smallholder farming is structurally fragile. The long-term direction—whether we like it or not—may involve land pooling, leasing models, rental income against land, and large operators running farms with scale, precision, and capital discipline. Farmers would shift from risk-bearing owners to asset-holders and skilled workers.

This is controversial, emotional, and complex. Indian agriculture may be moving—slowly and painfully—from ownership-based survival farming to enterprise-based land use.

Farmer suicides are an emergent outcome of historical neglect, uneven geography, distorted incentives, informal finance, and mental health neglect. Remove one factor, and the crisis still persists.

Reflections from Pune Agripreneurs Meetup

Pune Agripreneurs Meetup became extremely personal. We heard friends share how they fell in love with agriculture. We heard friends share how they missed the growth of their children.

We shared how we navigate our lives of entrepreneurship with family commitments.

I also goofed up with two gentlemen missing our gathering despite taking the trouble to come all the way. My sincere apologies.

This event was special with the presence of my mentor Prithwiraj N Ghorpade. We explored how our systems make it difficult to pursue our passions.

Renuka Diwan shared beautifully her journey, especially that poignant moment when it clicked to discover her passion to work with farmers. Navdeep Malhotra also shared his fascinating journey in ensuring how important it is to fulfill our svadharma besides building organizations.Deep gratitude to Sanket Kapadnis and Neeraj for joining us and sharing their journeys and dreams.

I owe another meetup to this city. I will come again.

Three Types of Intermediaries

There are three kinds of intermediaries who come between farmers and consumers in smallholding agriculture contexts.

1> Exploitative Intermediary:
This is easy to understand. They play by the rules of the market. Although they share deep social relationship with farmers, in the domain of the market, they share an adversarial relationship that stems from treating farmers as "suppliers". They want to keep the cost of sourcing as low as possible. It’s a zero-sum game. The market, thanks to its vagaries, rewards them (thereby punishing farmers) and punishes them (thereby rewarding farmers). Farmers are content with this relationship as they look at the total tally of reward/punishment over a longer period of time. They are content to set the bar low and count their blessings.

2> Non-Exploitative Intermediary:

This is a niche emerging segment of intermediary players who genuinely want to improve the income of farmers through premiumisation. They track farmer incomes and set prices based on how much the farmer is making. They keep the prices fairly stable and pass on the costs to willing consumers who are willing to pay premium for the feel-good karma of treating farmers fairly. However, at the end of the day, their business lies on being an intermediary between the farmer and the consumer

3> Catalytic Intermediary:

This is a further niche segment that I met recently in Pune. Catalytic intermediaries want to bring farmers and consumers together without taking their pie. They genuinely want to empower farmers without any agenda. They see farmers as humans and aim to facilitate a relationship where farmers take care of consumers' health and consumers take care of farmers' lives.

Catalytic Intermediary exists because they exist outside the framework of markets. They understand that no matter how benevolent market might seem, it fundamentally reduces farmers into mere economic actors. They seek to address the core of the challenges faced by farmers, which goes far beyond their economic predicament. They treat farmers equally as consumers and set their relationship on mutual terms. Very few agripreneurs understand the importance and necessity of catalytic intermediary and some of them I know are striving towards removing themselves in between farmers and consumers.

Here is how the collective defines the system they have built over the past seven years:

System/Order:

1. This is not a platform for selling alone, here Organizers do not have any economic interests. This system is just a way to volunteer/contribute to the Society in order to have fair system for natural goods distributions from farmers to consumers directly.

2. This System can accommodate only a limited number of members. Hence, if needed, such a system can be duplicated at other places to accommodate more members for the same noble cause. All such Systems/Groups need to be decentralized so as to enable appropriate decision making for their own smooth functioning. Organizers can interact with each other for appropriate reasons to strengthen such Systems/Groups.

3. Everybody has a responsibility to strengthen this System/Group by their own contributions to the purpose stated above.”

Farmer’s Responsibilities and Expected Contributions

1. Farmers are expected to provide toxic-free fruits, vegetables and grains grown with the help of natural methods of farming.

2. In order to maintain sustainable farming and nutrition in food, farmers are expected to use heirloom/original seeds.

3. Farmers are expected to share their experiences and practices about sustainable farming methods and techniques.

4. Farmers are expected to provide regular updates about each crop/produce they plan to distribute on the group to maintain transparency. These updates shall include farming methods, expected produce, photos and other appropriate details related to farming.

I know of one intermediary who is building a non-profit to become a catalytic intermediary. A model of this kind cannot be built by a system-focus that inevitably moved towards scale. A model of this kind exists in scale-invariant mode and grows through human relationships.

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.🙏

💗 If you like “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

State of Agritech - 16th January 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ The Good, Bad and the Ugly Loans of Indian Agriculture

Why are bad loans (read as Non-Performing Assets (NPAs)) increasing in Indian agriculture? How have banks insulated themselves from the volatility of the monsoon and the farm? How do we determine if agricultural NPAs are within safe limits and as good as other loans?

2/ Inside Shaktiman’s Strength and Achilles Heel

A peek inside India’s one of leading agri-mechanisation players with operations spanning 105 countries and revenues exceeding ₹1,690 crore. How did Tirth Agro become world’s largest rotary tiller manufacturer? What could be its strategic blind spot?

3/ Blinkit Introduces Fresh Produce with ‘Trusted Organic’ Certification.

Can we trust fresh organic produce delivered via quick commerce? I analyzed the test report of one vendor selling organic produce inside Blinkit with ‘Trusted Organic’ Certification. What does it tell us about fresh organic food produce sold in Indian markets vis-a-vis European markets?

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.

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Here is the podcast schedule for January 2026. Paid Subscribers and Patrons of Krishi.System can join the conversations live and join the Q&A towards the end. For everyone else, the recorded podcasts will be shared post-facto as posts with summary of my learnings.

1. Vrikshayurveda Deepdive (Part 2) with Dr. A.V. Balasubramanian | 13th Janu…

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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?

<Subscriber-Only> Green shoots and 2026 Agritech Predictions

The agritech ecosystemic grapevine is buzzing. From offline edtech models for B.Sc Agri graduates stuck in the government-job-or-sales-job trap, to agri-input firms eyeing a ₹12,000-15,000 crore AdBlue opportunity hiding in plain sight at highway petrol pumps.

Agrivoltaics has finally hit escape velocity. And yes, agentic AI agritech ventures (Ex-Jiva?) are coming for the contentious retailer-manufacturer relationship.

I also reconcile my 2023-2025 predictions. The government’s stealth approach to agricultural income taxation: Building surveillance infrastructure first, taxing later. The fertilizer DBT-to-farmer-accounts. And the “Great Hedge” between digital-consolidation states and real-consolidation states?

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

<Subscriber-Only> Meet the Indian Agritech IPO Contenders

It has been raining IPOs in India. Captain Fresh, Samunnati, Arya.ag, Ecozen and Milky Mist are among the top contenders for the Indian Agritech IPO race.

When I look at the leading contenders, the broader pattern that is emerging is this:

The agritech sector is bifurcating into “Asset-Light Marketplaces” and “Asset-Heavy/Enabler Infrastructures.”, depending on the capital efficiency and the amount of operational control they have towards their supply chain.

Those who have cracked this asset-light/asset-heavy debate are those who have discovered the golden mean of asset control. Either through ownership of IP (as in the case of Ecozen) or critical infrastructure (as in the case of Captain Fresh and Milky Mist) or through ownership of trust and relationship layer (as in the case of Samunnati and Arya.Ag).

You either own the critical asset or monetize the flow without owning the liability. This becomes a perfect 2 x 2 if you plot the quadrant based on capital efficiency and operational asset control.

More on the analysis and detailed exploration of the 2x2 in a recent edition of Krishi.System. I wrote a follow-up on 5th January 2026 in the context of Captain Fresh withdrawing IPO Papers and Arya.Ag raising Series-D.

A Visit to Center for Indian Knowledge Systems

Few days ago, I had the privilege of spending a day at the Center for Indian Knowledge Systems which has been conserving and productizing 171 traditional rice varieties and 30 vegetable varieties of Tamizhnadu.

Almost every VIP who visits India and Tamizhnadu (including Modi) takes home their gift box. For their work touches the core pride of India and her knowledge systems that is still waiting to discover its highest potential after seventy seven years of political independence.

The Center for Indian Knowledge Systems was born in 1995 when Balu quit his Ph.D in molecular biology in the US and came back to India. Viji was doing her Ph.D in the use of spiders as biocontrol agents.

This was much before Indian Knowledge systems (IKS) became vogue in IITs. They researched Vriksha Ayurveda much before agricultural universities took it seriously. They still don't. They began conserving traditional varieties when Green Revolution's high-yielding varieties were considered unquestionable progress.

Today, when most IKS approaches attempt to seek validation from western knowledge systems, it was deeply humbling to listen to this amazing couple share their fascinating journey, conducting field trials and lab studies of bio pesticides that were formulated from Vriksha Ayurveda.

They helped build 22 farmer producer organisations across 9 districts with 33000 shareholders (42% women), converted 10000 hectares into organic cultivation, conducted more than 5k farmer training, published 200 publications in six languages, with 200000 copies that have been disseminated in India and 37 countries.

With a twenty five member team, they operate at every node from seed conservation to sustainable organic cultivation packages to biopesticide production units to soil testing labs and processing infrastructure and finally market linkage units.

And they did this while navigating, what Balu candidly says, "fits and starts" with government programs and "no long term linkages" with universities and research institutions.

That's the unsexy part of pioneering. You're building the proof of the pudding, much before people learn to appreciate its taste.

Today, IKS is in National Education Policy. Traditional rice varieties like Karuppu kavuni command premium prices. Organic is mainstream vocabulary.

Do we even have the right Impact metrics to measure ecosystemic impact? Standard impact metrics viz, measuring smallholder farmer incomes, fall short in truly evaluating their inter generational work.

CIKS is not content with its past laurels.

They want to build a living museum on rice. They want to partner with biological companies that can take their vrikshayurved biopesticide formulations forward. They want to build small scale machinery for agriculture ; evolve business models for input units such as neem seed powder and neem soap. They want to do further research on therapeutic property of traditional rice varieties.

I hope to do my bit for this important cause

300ml for Vitality. 3 Litres for Mortality

In the data war rooms of Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, and Country Delight, the tender coconut is affectionately called as a "Hero SKU."

Despite being heavy and hard to stack, it is consistently the #1 item in the Fruit & Vegetable category. Country Delight even built a campaign around the "300ml promise", marketing it as the ultimate vessel of nature-derived hydration.

In many places, thanks to quick commerce boom, the tender coconut market is organizing itself based on the volume promise to feed to this urban wellness audience who now can make tender coconut a daily habit, an everyday subscription delivered to homes like a milk packet.

The essential point here is that in the city, we view tender coconut through the lens of Wellness.

But if you look at the agricultural history of Tamil Nadu, specifically the semi-arid, rainfed districts of Virudhunagar and Madurai, the "use case" for the tender coconut was terrifyingly different.

If you have watched the National Award-winning film Baaram, you might know about Thalaikoothal tradition.

It was a traditional practice of "organized euthanasia" or senicide, observed in communities that had no economic surplus to care for the terminally ill or the elderly.

The method relied on the exact same biological properties of tender coconut that quick commerce folks market to us:

The Cooling: An oil bath before dawn to drop body temperature.
The Potassium: Force-feeding liters of tender coconut water.

In a healthy body, that potassium regulates blood pressure. In a frail, hypothermic body, that massive influx causes Hyperkalemia—leading to renal failure and a silent cardiac arrest.

The same chemical compound (K+) that we pay a premium for to alkalize our bodies and live a healthy life can also be used to quietly end a "burdened life."

Every SKU in food and agribusiness carries a fascinating culture and history. When technology disrupts these traditions, what happens to the culture behind?

Invitation to Join Sixth Agripreneurs Retreat

There is not much of a difference between someone who runs an NGO in agriculture and some who runs an agribusiness enterprise.

No matter what your business model is structured as, you are essentially dealing with production risk underpinning farming and working in a sector that sits squarely at the intersection of samaaj (society) and sarkaar (government) and bazaar (market).

In my work at Krishi.System, I am encountering two archetypes:

1) Entrepreneurs who have built good businesses and are now hungry to create deeper impact that creates a legacy in the foot sands of history.

2) Entrepreneurs who have discovered the impact code and are now looking to make it financially sustainable to take their work forward.

The first kind often tend to be running agribusinesses and the second kind often tend to be running NGOs/Trusts. For the longest time, both of the kinds never interacted much with each other.

In my Agripreneur retreats, both the kinds come together and it's often incredible to watch their collaboration turns into a dance that rivals the joy Akshaye Khanna exudes when he shakes a leg in traditional Balochistan dance!

When for-profit and not-for-profit discover how their work complement each other, there is incredible joy in the air! They may be cut from different cloth. But they deeply sing and dance to the common underlying rhythm that drives the passion towards agriculture!

After hosting five successful retreats, We are gearing up for the sixth Agripreneurs Retreat exclusive for Regenerative agripreneurs in Bhopal.

Recently, during a social gathering, I met the wife of an agripreneur who had earlier done our agripreneurs retreat. She movingly shared how her husband became a whole new person after the retreat. In my mind, that's the ultimate benchmark we strive for.

Retreat spaces are regenerative spaces in the truest sense of the word. We have done agripreneur retreat in various parts of the country.

West - Nashik
East - Chilika Lake, Odisha
North - Jaipur
South - Bangalore and Coimbatore.

Many folks from central India have been asking us to host retreat there. And we are hosting it this time in Bhopal.

The challenges faced by agripreneurs are quite different from other founders. We are dealing with a sector that is slow to change for good and bad reasons. We are also dealing with a more diverse range of players and forces within and beyond our control.

Join us for the sixth Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat in Bhopal. We are planning to invite forty agripreneurs. Applications invited. Do share details about how you are regenerating food and agriculture systems in the application form.

Dates: 19th - 20th - 21st February | Venue: Ratapani Jungle Lodge, Bhopal | Applications are welcome!

Learnings From Chennai Agripreneurs Meetup

Chennai Agripreneurs Meetup was a blast. We discussed ideology, politics and finance.

→Is specialization good or bad for small holding farmers? What are the tradeoffs when compared to diversification? which has higher chances of increasing incomes of small holding farmers?

→ Does specialization/ diversification break feudal traps? How do we break feudalism traps in rural India?

—> What is the psychology of venture capital? Which psychological stances improve the success of venture capital ? What is the ultimate play of debt in the life of entrepreneurs?

Next Agripreneur Meetup: Bangalore (23rd January) |R̥SVP here

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.🙏

💗 If you like “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

I am excited to kickstart the first 2026 Krishi.System Townhall with Dr. AV Balasubramanian happening today at 2 PM IST.

In conversations around regenerative agriculture, It has become quite a cliche to talk about integrating the knowledge of traditional and contemporary sciences. But what exactly does that mean? Is it possible to harmonize both of these systems with divergent world-views and taxonomies?

Today, thanks to India’s ruling party BJP’s focus on Indian Knowledge Systems, there are plenty of conversations around Vrikshayurveda. I see several agricultural research institutions talk about it. But how are we applying Vrikshayurveda to address today's problems?

Vrikshayurveda (Ayurveda for plants) is not merely a collection of "grandma's recipes" but a structured theoretical framework based on Tridosha and Panchamahabhuta.

Center for Indian Knowledge Systems has validated these ancient texts by testing them in modern fields. How do we productize these experiments and take them to the market in the biological ecosystem?

In Western agronomy, we diagnose N-P-K deficiency. In Vrikshayurveda, we diagnose Vata-Pitta-Kapha imbalance in a plant. Can we train computer vision models to recognize Vata-Pitta-Kapha imbalances? Can we create a 'data dictionary' that translates Sanskrit diagnostic markers into visual symptoms a camera can see?

We are seeing a boom in bio-stimulants in the VC world. However, Vrikshayurveda inputs (like fermented concoctions) have a short shelf-life and high variability. How do we build infrastructure that can improve shelf-life and increase adoption among farmers? We will explore these and more.

Krishi.System community patrons and paid subscribers can join the townhall and join the live Q&A at the end.

We plan to do this in two parts. Today’s conversation will focus on understanding Indian view of science and in the second part, we will go deeper into the nuances of Vrikshayurveda.

Paid subscribers can join the link below. If you cannot join in, no worries. The recording will be shared.

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State of Agritech - 5th January 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ 2026 Agritech Predictions and Reconciling 2025/2024/2023 Predictions

Shall we look at green shoots for agritech founders and agritech investors in 2026? Shall we reconcile 2025/2024/2023 predictions and examine them in hindsight retrospectively?

2/ Has Amul strayed from its fundamental purpose?

Amul is no longer about milk. They are now an FMCG behemoth. They are democratizing organic. Is there something called too much diversification in agritech? What is the fundamental purpose of Amul? Is Amul diversifying to survive inflation?

3/ Captain Fresh withdraws IPO Papers and Arya.Ag raises Rs. 725 crores in Series-D Round

Follow-up to my “Meet the Indian Agritech IPO Contenders”. While Captain Fresh’s listing plans remain active, what is the strategic play underneath? What is the essential paradox we are dealing in making sense of Arya.Ag?

Programming Note: Last year, I wrote more posts outside the paywall than inside. This year, I plan to reverse it. Why? With AI, the content game has transformed forever. High-agency content like mine have better shelf-life inside a paywall. ICYMI. I have slashed the prices of subscription earlier as well.

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.

Read more