India is an agriculturally-driven country with 70 per cent of its rural households still dependent primarily on agriculture for their livelihood. With technology advancing rapidly and making its way into different sectors, agricultural space has welcomed it next. Farmers, who are the backbone of the agricultural sector, will not have to worry about climate uncertainties, vague soil condition knowledge, and water and pest issues due to the technological innovations that Indian agritech companies are bringing into the picture. They can make informed decisions backed by sophisticated tools that can give them better returns, uplift their lifestyles and ultimately make India's agricultural productivity numbers grow. Ninjacart is a business-to-business fresh produce supply chain that connects farmers and manufacturers to retailers directly.

We, at NextBigWhat, are attempting to drive forward the conversation around Artificial Intelligence in India beyond headlines that scream for attention but don't offer much, buzzwords that make your head buzz after a while, and countless utopian tales that vie for your eyes only to leave you with a scratching head and a lingering itch to actually get to the meat of the matter. In this spirit, the #AIBoss series intends to educate, inform and elevate our readers understanding of the subject as well as the space. If you're part of the leadership team of an AI based product, from enterprise or startup, willing to share your AI learnings – then reach out to us and become part of this initiative (you can apply using this form). Here is the first of our three part interview with Shailendra Tiwari, founder of Fasal, an Ag-tech (agriculture tech) startup that is focused on building AI and IOT (Internet-of-things) based SAAS solutions to address the woes of Indian horticulture farmers. Fasal's primary aims are to increase and improve the quality of the yield and lower input costs for the farmer.

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.