RFP - Technology Innovations for Boosting Farmers’ Income from start-ups and Sme’s Under Agri-Grand Challenge

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About the Organization

Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) is a not-for-profit Section 8, Schedule B, Public Sector Enterprise, set up by Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India as an Interface Agency to strengthen and empower the emerging Biotech enterprise to undertake strategic research and innovation, addressing nationally relevant product development needs.

BIRAC is a industry-academia interface and implements its mandate through a wide range of impact initiatives, be it providing access to risk capital through targeted funding, technology transfer, IP management and handholding schemes that help bring innovation excellence to the biotech firms and make them globally competitive. In its Eight years of existence, BIRAC has initiated several schemes, networks and platforms that help to bridge the existing gaps in the industry-academia Innovation research and facilitate novel, high quality affordable products development through cutting edge technologies. BIRAC has initiated partnerships with several national and global partners to collaborate and deliver the salient features of its mandate.

About the Proposal

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 ruralhouseholds 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.

Key Features

• 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 Management3
• 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

Eligibility Criteria:

• The proposals can be submitted:
• Solely by a start-up, SME or Company* incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013 or Limited Liability Partnership (LLP)** incorporated under the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 or Joint Ventures either in the form of Company/ LLP or
• By any of the above entities in collaboration with other private or public partners (Universities or Institutes).
• *Minimum 51% of the shares of the Company should be held by Indian Citizens holding Indian passport (Indian Citizens do not include Person of Indian Origin (PIO) and Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) holders)
• **Minimum half of the persons who subscribed their names to the LLP document as its Partners should be Indian citizens.4
• The Applicant Company/LLP/Startup should either:-
• Have adequate in-house facility to address the project implementation (which shall be evaluated during the site visit) or
• Incubated with any of the recognized Incubation Facility
• For Academic collaborator:
• Eligible Academia shall mean an entity which is having proper establishment documents
• For Public or Private Institute, University, NGO, or Research Foundation, proper registration/ accreditation from a government body is mandatory like UGC affiliation certification, AICTE, CSIR /DSIR/SIRO certificate etc

How to Apply?

Eligible applicants (start-ups, SME’s, companies) along with their collaborators (if any) are required to submit the application form online available on BIRAC website in the prescribed format before July 15, 2022.

For more information Please check the Link

Tags Entrepreneurship Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Innovations and Technology Others