India's agritech startups are employing data mining and AI to improve crop yield, make farming profitable- Technology News, Firstpost

Bangalore: In 2016, The Times of India reported that 253 farmers from Lalkheda village in Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh received an average of Rs 2.83 (4 US cents) each as insurance payouts for the loss of their soybean crop under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (the flagship prime minister's crop-insurance scheme). The insurer blamed the farmers for taking insufficient cover. The story got 29-year-old Prateep Basu, then an engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), thinking. How was it possible, he wondered, that a country which had been using remote-sensing technology for decades could fail to use it for accurate crop forecasting when the lives of so many millions crucially depended on such information? The four of them went on to form SatSure, a data-analytics startup with "a mission to evolve crop insurance products and provide an accurate risk assessment of crop yield by integrating climatic variables with geospatial and economic datasets."