In a land where roughly 70% of the population resides in rural areas and half of the nation’s population farms for a living, the importance of India’s agricultural sector cannot be overstated. Despite these massive numbers, the country’s agricultural output has been unable to keep pace with growing demands and global competition. According to the World Bank, [...]

Agriculture suffers in India in spite of the fact that a vast majority of Indians depend on it. Government interventions in terms of minimum support prices, farmers’ markets as well as technology interventions like mobile-based update on weather and soil quality have resulted only in piecemeal success, if any, in improving the farmer’s income. When [...]

The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers tag. In this edition TCI-Changemaker focuses on Shop for [...]

The importance of the financial product microinsurance has been written about before on TC-I (here, here, and here). One constiuency that stands to benefit greatly from the idea of low premium safety nets are farmers, whose dependence on crop yield for income makes them very vulnerable to unforseen weather changes. In light of ongoing climate [...]

This op-ed was submitted by Suresh Pramar, and is a user post. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of TC-I, but we feel that it is important to cultivate opinions from all sides. India like the rest of the world has not escaped the impacts of the current downturn. The sudden rush in [...]

Editor’s Note: Guest blogger Lindsay Clinton is an Associate Vice President at Intellecap, where she is the Managing Editor of Beyond Profit and Microfinance Insights. Prior to joining Intellecap, she worked as the Marketing and Communications Director at The White House Project, a women’s leadership organization based in New York City. Lindsay writes a semi-regular [...]

Start Up Story covers a social enterprise, Matchbox Solutions, that addresses technology and process improvements for critical business segments.  One of these solutions focuses on the agribusiness supply chain through eFarm: eFarm is a Farm-to-Home supply chain Platform for procuring and delivering farm based produce in a transparent, economical and efficient manner. eFarm ties in [...]

TCI had earlier discussed open innovation as an emerging tool for social entrepreneurs. An excellent initiative in this field is Ashoka Changemakers, which provides an online space for social innovators to present ideas and collaborate with others on refining and implementing them. Changemakers is building the world’s first global online “open source” community that competes [...]

The Hindu reports about mKrishi (mobile Krishi) a mobile agro advisory system launched by Tata.  It can help farmers get personalized advise and updated information on their mobile phones about factors that may affect their crops such as weather. Prima facie, this looks very similar to Nokia’s LifeTools that ThinkChange India reported a few days earlier.  However, [...]

Nokia is about to launch a set of “Life Tools” to be embedded in its mobile phones in an effort to expand its base into rural India. These Life Tools cater to the needs of the rural community with information on three different sectors namely Agriculture, Education, Entertainment. On agriculture, the Life Tool is likely [...]