A group of young people gather in an open field in Telangana, southern India. They take turns trying out flying an agricultural drone meant to spray pesticides, in a session organised by a drone merchant.
These university students in Nalgonda district come from families who have been farming in the region for generations. They plan to pool their resources and buy a drone to offer local farmers a pesticide spraying service, charging them INR 400-500 (USD 4-5) per acre. Depending on its size and features, a basic 10-16-litre drone can cost anywhere between INR 2.5 lakh and 6 lakh (USD 2,600-6,300).
“We already use drones to spray pesticides on our crops. We can earn up to INR 10 lakh a year if we [offer] the drones [as a pesticide spraying service],” 21-year-old Shiva Reddy tells Dialogue Earth. His family owns 21 acres of farmland in Nalgonda.
For Reddy and his friends, the drone is both a business opportunity and a response to rising farming labour costs. Amidst mounting ecological pressures from climate change and erratic weather, younger farmers in the district told Dialogue Earth they are willing to experiment with drones. They are also open to trying digital advisory services – subscription apps which deliver real-time, location-specific farming tips and alerts – and precision agriculture, which uses data to manage crop variations.
Increasingly, India is moving towards adopting such technologies to increase efficiency in farming, while reducing environmental impacts. The use of agricultural drones to spray agrochemicals, for instance, can reduce wastage while saving time and money, some agricultural researchers note. “It also reduces human exposure to hazardous substances while seamlessly integrating with data analytics platforms for monitoring and analysis,” they wrote.
Under the Indian government’s Digital Agriculture Mission, set up in 2024, several digital platforms were launched to help farmers keep track of farming-related data. For instance, Agri Stack is a unified database of farmer, land and crop records that aims to simplify farmer access to subsidies, credit and advice. The Krishi Decision Support System, meanwhile, analyses data such as soil health, satellite imagery and weather data to generate yield estimates as well as drought and flooding assessments. The government is also piloting a new mobile app in dozens of states to make it easier for farmers to apply for subsidised fertiliser.
India’s broader goals are to make tried and tested agri-tech exportable, say researchers and entrepreneurs Dialogue Earth consulted. To achieve this, the country needs farmers to adopt the technologies. “If you want to export a technology, you first have to train it, test it and then deploy it,” says Rajashekar Reddy, director of Delta Things, a Hyderabad-based agri-tech company that builds devices for soil analysis, pest control and weather stations.
Notably, this increasing integration of technology in the country’s farming ecosystem has impacted older farmers. Those with a low-risk attitude can find it challenging to adapt. Younger farmers often support them in navigating these technologies, Dialogue Earth found.
Assisting older farmers while reducing emissions
Muthyala Sathaiya, 65, walks into the office of a farmer membership collective in Nalgonda holding a handwritten chit from his fertiliser input dealer. Sathaiya is here to collect bags of fertiliser that his input dealer ordered online on his behalf a few days ago. He’s accompanied by his 35-year-old neighbour Vanam Jagan, who has come to assist him in case of any digital hiccups.
“I do not understand the process of booking fertilisers online. I had to go around for four days and request educated kids in my village to [help me] get a one-time password [to get registered on the fertiliser sale app],” Sathaiya tells Dialogue Earth.
As of 2016, the average farmer in India was 50. Many of them have lived through decades of evolution and upheaval of the country’s agricultural policies – starting from the 1960s, when the green revolution pushed the country towards large-scale commercial monocropping, primarily of wheat and rice. It led to the mechanisation of farm tools, adoption of new irrigation techniques and increased use of agricultural chemicals to produce higher yields, all of which expanded the produce market by the 2000s.
The indiscriminate use of chemicals inadvertently created pressures on natural resources such as land, water and biodiversity. In recent decades, it has made pests resistant to pesticides and reduced beneficial insects.
Today, India continues to be a major emitter of methane from rice cultivation, as well as nitrous oxide, produced when soil bacteria break down nitrogen-based fertilisers like urea. However, the country lacks a mandatory emission reduction policy in its agricultural sector.
Increasingly, extreme and unpredictable weather events directly impact crop production and farmer income. This year, researchers at Australia’s Monash University found that a 20% reduction in rainfall would induce an 8% reduction in all-crop national average yields in India, notably 11% for rice and cotton. While a 1C rise in temperature would lead to the biggest reductions for pearl millet and maize, at 19% and 16% respectively.
In Telangana, this year’s agricultural sowing season was delayed due to a late monsoon. El Niño conditions have reportedly kept water levels low in the state’s reservoirs, affecting cultivation of Kharif (monsoon) crops. Every year is more unpredictable than the last.
Agri-tech attempts to combat this problem. For instance, the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture promotes climate-resilient farming through soil health cards – biennial soil nutrient test reports provided to farmers to make farmland more climate adaptable. The scheme also champions water-use efficiency through micro-irrigation.
Increased efficiencies?
But recently, even more advanced technology is being employed in agriculture. Precision agriculture has increased and been promoted significantly worldwide, notes Kushang Mishra, a University of Auckland doctoral researcher studying the digitisation of agriculture in India. This type of farming uses real-time data and predictive algorithms to manage crops. The Indian government, research institutions and civil society organisations have been pushing for precision agriculture.
A press note released by the Indian government earlier this year highlighted an AI-enabled precision farming system developed by a Tamil Nadu-based startup. It noted how a government-backed coconut farm in the state used sensors to monitor real-time soil moisture, irrigation and fertiliser use through a mobile platform, resulting in yields doubling. This system has been adopted by over 3,500 farmers, it said.
With precision agriculture, “labour intervention is reduced, input costs come down, irrigation and fertilisation become timely, and only the required quantity is applied”, says Jella Satyanarayana, project head of the Agri-robotics Lab at Professor Jayashankar Telangana Agricultural University in Hyderabad. “That reduces wastage and improves productivity.”
However, Mishra and other experts caution that precision agriculture is not necessarily synonymous with sustainable agriculture, and may not reduce use of agrochemicals. “Instead of providing a solution to chemical-based agriculture, which has sort of polluted our soil [and] has had so much environmental impact, these technologies might actually legitimise these chemical-based farming practices,” he says.
On Jagan’s eight acres of agricultural land, he has used drones, mechanised machinery and got his soil tested, among other interventions. Despite all this, he says the results have been disappointing. He says his soil has been degraded by years of using chemical plant growth stimulants recommended by agricultural input dealers, who he alleges were motivated by sales commissions.
Despite advancements in agri-tech, farmers in nearby villages still rely on migrant workers for farm labour, especially during a bad weather year, says Jagan.
Farmers remain focused on immediate concerns such as erratic weather, rising input and labour costs and securing better prices, says Mishra. “Things like farm data are not on their priority list,” he says.
Exporting use cases
Data on soil quality, weather and crops are commercially valuable. Mishra worries that, were this data accessible to big businesses selling pesticides or fertilisers, they could do “targeted advertisements”. He says the data could also be used by banks and insurers “who can understand, ‘Okay, this particular area here has this chemical profile or this much soil moisture, so how should we target this particular area?’”
Businesses are expected to comply with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act by May 2027. How the law will apply to agricultural data, much of which falls in a grey area between personal and non-personal information, remains uncertain. “We need to see how the policy evolves,” says Reddy of Delta Things.
Even as questions over data governance remain unresolved, India is expanding the reach of its digital agriculture ecosystem beyond its borders. The recent India-Vietnam Joint Statement on Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership is one such example. It emphasised cooperation and two-way investment in digital technologies for smart agriculture, water management and technology transfer.
While the statement did not identify specific technologies or companies, researchers and entrepreneurs Dialogue Earth spoke to noted that India’s advantage lies in developing data-driven agricultural solutions.
The country’s diverse soils, cropping systems and climatic conditions provide companies with a broad testing ground, experts say. Predictive algorithms can be refined across multiple crop cycles, weather patterns and irrigation practices, generating datasets and use cases that are difficult to replicate elsewhere, they note. “We don’t need to compete with China in manufacturing,” says Reddy of Delta Things. “What we can export is the use of those sensors, the use cases.”
“If we develop good algorithms and improve their accuracy, that’s what we can export,” he says, adding that his company has exported agricultural sensors to Hungary and Malaysia. Customers there were looking to analyse their crops’ nutrient absorption trends and determine which nutrients to add to the soil.
But experts caution that Indian technologies will require adaptation to local soils, governance systems, infrastructure and farming practices before they can succeed elsewhere.
According to Satyanarayana, the upfront cost of the technology limits its uptake. Additionally, many digital agriculture tools are designed with larger farms in mind and are not particularly optimised to India’s predominantly small and fragmented landholdings. “Large [farms] are already using robots, drones and agricultural sensors,” he says. “Small and marginal farmers are not, because of the cost and because the technology is not yet fine-tuned for farms of their size.”
That’s where young farmers’ adaptability to technology could come in.
Back in Nalgonda, during a break in the drone testing session, Shiva Reddy shared that he remains on the fence about predictive algorithms. “They can’t predict that easily,” he says, adding that farmers in his village don’t use them. But he expressed willingness to try them in the future.
