In its 20th year of launch, ITC Agri has rolled e-Choupal 4.0, a more collaborative and integrated platform that leverages new digital technologies to provide end-to-end and personalised services to farmers on weather and markets on a real-time basis.
“The core expectation from the farmer is how weather forecast translates into an advisory that translates into farm input, which gets supported by credit and results in more money into his hand. That’s the role the 4.0 performs in this evolution of the farmer-centric and farmer-driven innovation,” said S. Sivakumar, group head, ITC Agri business.
Rapid quality testing
According to him, the new platform delivers information on crop monitoring, crop advisory and electronic marketing place for farm inputs, helps in remote sensing for addressing crop stress and with the help of start-ups, does rapid quality testing. These features are integrated in the 4.0 version.
Till date, the e-Choupal programme has empowered four million farmers. The company originally planned to empower 10 million farmers by 2030. With some of these reforms and potential advancement of technologies, ITC aims to achieve this goal ahead of its targeted time.
“After rolling out several pilots in 2019, e-Choupal is now in a stage to build on pilot and scale up.
There are different interventions. ITC e-Choupal 4.0 is more ready for plug and play for many agricultural start-ups to deliver many features,” Mr. Sivakumar observed.
