AI can't solve farm distress but takes baby steps to improve farm productivity in India FactorDaily

Two out of three Indians count on agriculture as their primary livelihood yet the sector contributes just one-sixth of the country's national income. For long, policy mandarins and economists have bemoaned this skew and the urgent need to boost farm productivity but little has moved the needle in Indian farming in recent decades except in pockets. Like in every other sector, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, combined with on the ground automated sensing using internet of things devices, is being deployed in agriculture, too. The start-ups are paving the way for tech to to help the Indian farmer to tackle one the biggest challenges before farming: uncertainty. "Uncertainty is the poison in the blood of Indian farming. Farming is difficult and stressful, driving farmers out of farming and sometimes even to suicide. Technology companies in the agri-tech space are helping to make farming into a more stable and desirable industry," says Kahn, a Harvard MBA with over a decade in the Indian agriculture space Today a handful of startups working on AI-backed solutions are paving the way ahead for bringing in the tech to help the Indian farmer to tackle one of the biggest challenges: uncertainty.