Agritech players hail govt's emphasis on PPP model for post-harvest innovation in interim Budget

The agricultural technology (agritech) industry's founders and investors have welcomed the government's emphasis on public-private partnerships for post-harvest innovation in the interim budget for 2024.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her announcement of the interim budget for 2024, emphasised the government's intentions to encourage both private and public investment in post-harvest activities. This includes areas such as aggregation, modern storage, efficient supply chain, primary and secondary processing, marketing, and branding. The government's commitment to facilitating investment in these critical aspects of the agricultural value chain is aimed at fostering faster growth within the sector.

“In the agriculture sector, encouraging public-private partnerships (PPP) for post-harvest activities can directly address the chronic issues around food waste, low capacity utilisation of processing units, and standardised quality,” said Jinesh Shah, co-founder and managing partner of Omnivore, an agri-focused venture capital firm in India.

Karthik Jayaraman, Managing Director of WayCool Foods, has expressed agreement with the government's policy continuity in supporting the food and agriculture sectors, as highlighted in the interim budget.

“The new proposals of PPP Projects in post harvest management and value addition will help unlock entrepreneurship and value in the supply chain,” Jayaraman added.

Varun Khurana, Founder and CEO of agritech startup Otipy, believes the move will enhance the overall efficiency and competitiveness of Indian agriculture. “These measures align with the contemporary needs of the sector and are crucial steps towards ensuring long-term prosperity for farmers and fostering growth in the agritech landscape,” he added.

While there was no mention of the Agriculture Accelerator Fund in FM’s budget speech, the report on implementation of last year’s budget announcements said that the government is all set to identify problem statements and selection of startups by 15th February 2024. In addition, the accelerator fund will begin releasing the 1st phase of funding by 28th February 2024.

The Finance Minister in her budget speech for FY 2023-24 had announced the setting up of the Agriculture Accelerator Fund for promoting agri-startups by young entrepreneurs in rural areas.

Similarly, the document also highlighted that three core registries - Farmer registry, Geo referencing of village map registry and crop sown registry, supporting the earlier announced open source, open standard and interoperable Digital public infrastructure for agriculture, have been finalised.

“DPI, PM Kisan, DBT, eNAM - same as earlier - this will continue the sentiments of agri digitisation, price discovery. DPI is their focus so there will definitely be some progress in that direction. There was nothing specific about agri-exports, FPO, Agritech (AI, ML, IoT),”  Shashank Kumar, founder and CEO of agritech company DeHaat, told Moneycontrol.

While Kumar added that the announcements this year did not contain a lot of information on the government's plans for promoting agritech startups, he is bullish on more updates on this front post elections, if the government comes back to power.

To be sure, the interim budget announced earlier today was the last major economic document of the Narendra Modi-led government ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.