Samunnati is proud to be the Title Partner of the Virtual AgTech Summit 2020 hosted by ET. This is India’s 1st Virtual Summit on AgTech with the theme: “Envisioning Business Growth: Disruptive Technologies: IN and POST COVID Era”. The Summit initiated thought provoking discussions and advocated technology innovation and practices for business growth at the time of crisis. Exclusively working with farmer collectives (FPOs) on the supply side and with Agri Enterprises on the demand side, we understand the importance of technology interventions for improving the working conditions, increase efficiency amongst the agriculture community in the new normal.

In the opening remarks, Mr. Anil Kumar S G, Founder and CEO, Samunnati discussed how Samunnati sees the agricultural sector adopting to the new normal and being an entity with the mission of making markets work for small holder farmers is responding to current crisis.

Samunnati believes that as an ecosystem player we have a responsibility to make tailormade tech solutions for small holder farmers and farmer collectives in the areas of access of input (financial and non financial), farmer data management, market linkages and more. Mr. Nitin Chaudhary, Director, Samunnati Agro Solutions introduced some of the key Agtech Tools that are being designed by Samunnati in order to enable the FPOs and enable the agri value chains to operate at a higher equilibrium.

We at Samunnati, have kept our ears to the ground and constantly engaged with the customers so as to respond to their requirements. A panel discussion “A Roadmap of AgTech: Where the Rubber meets the Road”, was moderated by Mr. N Srinivasan, Sector expert and Chair of the Board, Samunnati and the esteemed speakers of the panel were Mr. Arindom Datta, Executive Director, Rural and Development Banking/Advisory, Rabobank; Mr. Alkesh Wadhwa, India Country Director, Poverty Alleviation, BMGF; Ms. Jyotsna Krishnan, Managing Director, Elevar Equity; Dr. Babita Singh, Technical Consultant (Senior), NRAA and Mr. PVS Suryakumar, Deputy Managing Director, NABARD.

The major discussion points of the panel were (i) What are the challenges faced by FPOs in the wake of COVID19? (ii) How can agtech and digital platform solutions help overcome the challenges faced by FPOs and their farmers? (iii) How can we prioritize the initiatives to resolve the challenges? (iv) What kind of collaboration and partnerships need to be built between players in the agtech, financial access, market linkage and FPOs space?