The Agri-Grand Challenge (AgGC), an initiative of BIRAC in partnership with IKP Knowledge Park (IKP), aims to identify and fast-track technology driven solutions that are almost ready to deploy and are scalable to help boost farmers’ income especially marginal and small landholding farmers. Agriculture plays a vital role in the Indian economy with over 70 per cent of the rural households depending on agriculture for their livelihoods. Agriculture contributes to around
17-18% of the country’s GDP and provides employment to around 60% of the population. The government is keen to focus on increase in farmers’ income and farmers’ welfare on the whole. A series of innovative technologies, practices, products, services, business model and/or integrated solutions, that have been piloted at a small scale in India will be identified, funded, monitored for field testing over a period of 30 months through a two-stage process in this
program. The focus of this Challenge will be to demonstrate increased incomes through deployment of selected technologies. To ensure impact, the selected innovations/start-ups in Stage 2 of the program, will test multiple crops in two agro-climatic zones and will include small and middle
landholding farmers. The AgGC will enable the selected entrepreneurs to test, refine and validate their solutions for rapid deployment in the market through expert mentorship and connecting with relevant commercial partners to aid the accelerated development, scale-up and distribution of their
solutions.
Thematic Areas for the call:
Proposals are invited in the following fields:
• Quality Inputs (seeds, planting material and crop-nutrition products) – product and
distribution innovations
• Genome edited plants under SDN1 and SDN2 category
• Pest and Disease Management
• Resource Management (soil and water sensors, water conservation, soil health, soil
microbes and crops interaction for healthy and sustainable farming, etc.)
• Bio-stimulants, bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides
• Quality assessment of agricultural output
• Weed control technologies
• Efficient Biologicals production technologies
• Farm Mechanization and Pervasive automation
• Digital Farming/Smart Agriculture (Precision and Digital agriculture, AI/ML-based, UAV
(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), sensors, robots, weather prediction, vertical farming,
organic farming, etc)
• Genomics knowledge driven precision breeding for climate resilient agriculture
• Harvesting and Post-harvest Loss Management
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• Farm level storage, processing and value addition, warehousing
• Livestock technology in areas including dairy, fisheries/aqua, goatry and piggery, feed
and feed supplements, quality assessment tools for dairy and other products, etc.
• Agri-fintech solutions to enable financing to small holder farmers
• Emerging agrcultural technologies (Blockchain, SaaS Technologies, traceability
solutions, etc.)
• Other allied areas

For more details visit: https://birac.nic.in/webcontent/1653886710_BIRAC_IKP_Agri.pdf