OPINION | India’s playbook holds lessons for Southeast Asia’s agri-tech moment

Decentralised clean energy for irrigation, storage, and logistics will determine whether agri-tech solutions remain affordable.

At the recent Grow Asia Investment Summit in Singapore, a panel on agri-tech investment turned to a familiar but vital question: what role should governments play in enabling innovation to scale?

It was telling that India became the reference point. Investors pointed to Aadhaar, UPI, and the emerging AgriStack as examples of how deliberate policy choices and public digital infrastructure can reshape value chains. Yet, India’s story goes far beyond these platforms. Its real relevance for Southeast Asia lies in the broader playbook, how digital systems, finance, markets, and energy reforms came together to move agri-tech from isolated pilots into national infrastructure.

ASEAN misses the benefits of scale

This lesson is more important for ASEAN now than ever. Agriculture still employs more than 80 million people across Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. Food security remains a political priority, and innovation is hardly in short supply: Vietnamese start-ups are pioneering smart irrigation, Indonesian firms are digitising supply chains, and Filipino platforms are connecting farmers to new buyers.

But these efforts remain scattered. Scaling across provinces or borders is slowed by uneven digital infrastructure, fragmented policies, and regulatory silos. India’s experience shows how deliberate government choices can alter the balance.

India’s coherent push

A decade ago, venture capital outside India’s tech hubs was scarce. Recognising the gap, New Delhi launched Start-up India and the Fund of Funds for Startups. Together, they amplified early-stage capital, giving private investors the confidence they needed.

By 2025, more than 1,200 start-ups had benefited, many in agri-tech. This was paired with the ambitious 10,000 Farmer-Producer Organisation (FPO) programme and the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund, which gave farmer groups access to credit and the ability to contract at scale. For the first time, start-ups were engaging with collectives that had balance sheets, not just individual smallholders.

Market reforms reinforced these shifts. The electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) now connects over 1,500 wholesale mandis, providing transparent price discovery. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) extended this principle to the digital marketplace, enabling FPOs and producers to reach buyers without being confined to closed platforms. The policy message was clear: openness and interoperability are deliberate choices.

Digital rails stitched the ecosystem together. Aadhaar-enabled identity, UPI-powered payments, and AgriStack are being built to unify farmer data for subsidies, insurance, and credit. The Account Aggregator framework allows farmers with little or no credit history to access loans using real-time financial data. Thin-file farmers who once relied on collateral or informal credit suddenly had access to formal finance.

Expanding the ambit of policy mix

Energy and technology policy were also part of the mix. Under the PM-KUSUM scheme, solar irrigation and rural electrification reduced diesel dependence, cutting costs for digital tools. Drone policy liberalisation, coupled with schemes like Namo Drone Didi that subsidise drones for women-led cooperatives, turned technology into last-mile service delivery rather than a showcase for wealthy farms.

None of these reforms alone transformed the agricultural sector. But together, they created a coherent system where start-ups, investors, and farmers could interact at scale, lowering costs and building trust.

Lessons for ASEAN

ASEAN countries are reaching a similar inflection point. Many governments are investing in digital ID—Indonesia’s NIK and KTP-el/IKD, Thailand’s ThaID, the Philippines’ PhilSys—but coverage and interoperability remain uneven. Payments are growing rapidly through mobile wallets, but cross-border transactions are still limited. Farmer databases often sit siloed in separate ministries, making it hard to deliver targeted support or aggregate demand.

India shows coherence across these layers matters more than scale in any single one. Digital ID without payments has limited value. Farmer registries without standards remain static databases. E-commerce without open protocols risks bottlenecks. ASEAN’s Digital Economy Framework Agreement, currently under negotiation, presents an opportunity to embed open standards, interoperability, and agriculture as a priority vertical.

Capital formation is another gap. Venture activity is growing in Indonesia and Singapore, but in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, many start-ups struggle to access seed rounds. A regional fund-of-funds modelled on India’s SIDBI approach could spread risk and crowd in private capital. ASEAN’s agricultural platforms could also adopt India’s FPO-plus-infrastructure model—treating farmer groups as investable entities.

Energy and sustainability are equally urgent. Southeast Asia faces climate risks from typhoons in the Philippines to droughts in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Decentralised clean energy for irrigation, storage, and logistics will determine whether agri-tech solutions remain affordable. India’s integration of solar into agricultural policy offers an instructive precedent.

The call to act

India’s journey is not without imperfections. However, it shows that transformation occurs when governments view digital and policy architecture as public infrastructure. UPI did not succeed because it was flawless; it succeeded because it was interoperable, low-cost, and mandated as a public good.

AgriStack is still evolving, but its ambition to integrate farmer identity, land records, and services is the kind of coherence that allows innovation to scale. e-NAM, ONDC, and the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund show how markets, capital, and technology can be integrated to steadily lower barriers for smallholders.

For ASEAN, the lesson is not to copy India wholesale. It is to recognise fragmentation as the real enemy of scale.

The stakes could not be higher. With climate change intensifying and food security high on political agendas, ASEAN must decide whether agri-tech remains a patchwork of pilots or becomes a regional backbone for food systems. India shows what becomes possible when governments choose the latter path.

(Suryaprabha Sadasivan is Senior Vice President, Chase Advisors.) 

Views expressed are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.