How the new research, development and innovation scheme can benefit the agritech sector

The traditional agriculture sector provides livelihood to about 42.3 percent of the population and has a share of 18.2 percent in the country’s GDP, as per the latest Economic Survey. Agritech startup founders, however, complain that the system is strained. Unpredictable weather, declining soil quality, shrinking landholdings and rising input costs are some of the challenges that bother agritech farmers. For years, the government has tried to patch these problems with subsidies and schemes. But now there’s growing momentum around a different approach, for which agritech companies are paving the way: Bringing in technology, and rethinking the system from the ground up.

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A new generation of startups is using AI (artificial intelligence), satellite imaging, IoT (Internet of Things) sensors, climate models and data platforms to tackle long-standing problems like forecasting crop yields, reducing waste, improving market linkages, and helping farmers adapt to climate shocks. Some are working on soil health. Others are focusing on water efficiency or financial inclusion. Many are trying to do all three. This surge in agritech isn’t happening in isolation, but is being driven by a wider shift in how India is thinking about climate and growth. The government is pushing hard on green reforms and sustainable development, and agriculture is at the centre of that push. These startups are also attracting a growing flow of private capital from both Indian and global investors, leading to the sector becoming one of the country’s most dynamic startup frontiers.

Some of these companies include DeHaat, Fuselage Innovations, Ninjacart, Fasal and Agrostar. Each of these companies is coming up with innovative technology, machinery or processes to ease the working of farmers and livestock. The RDI scheme can also benefit the growth of India’s agritech ecosystem and startups are excited.

Fuselage Innovations is one such agritech startup. With the help of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), it addresses critical challenges across multiple sectors, including post-natural disaster management, especially for farmers, along with infrastructure monitoring, and environmental conservation. As per Devan Chandrasekharan, founder, Fuselage Innovations, the RDI scheme tackles three long-standing barriers in agritech: Limited access to capital, fragmented digital infrastructure and the challenge of scaling climate-adaptive technologies. Currently, most component-level sourcing relies heavily on large infrastructure players and outsourced manufacturing. As the scheme unlocks concessional funding and strengthens domestic capability, companies can expect a reduction in overall product costs. In FY25, Fuselage Innovations, which has scaled across seven agricultural states, ring-fenced approximately 28 percent of their total operating budget covering both capital and operational expenditure for research programmes, pilot trials, and intellectual property development. Maintaining a one-third share of spending in R&D has directly supported the company’s integrated deployment of FIA drone platforms, tested and validated under real-world farm conditions.

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While there’s been strong momentum, companies like Fuselage Innovations do face bottlenecks, especially in accessing reliable field data, testing new technologies at scale, and finding specialised talent in areas like agri-AI and embedded systems. “The RDI scheme couldn’t have come at a better time. It has the potential to address these issues in a more coordinated way. The scheme’s integrated approach offering concessional funding along with support for digital infrastructure and R&D can smooth out some of these rough edges, helping companies like ours scale faster and take more risks on innovative, climate-resilient tech,” says Chandrasekharan.

Fuselage plans to apply for the RDI scheme, and if selected, it aims to use the funds to further develop and scale its core technology platforms, especially around sensors, AI-based crop analytics and drone automation. “Our past experience with the Agri Infrastructure Fund given by the government showed us how critical the right kind of support can be. With the RDI scheme, we hope to take our solutions from regional success stories to national scale,” Chandrasekharan adds.

Nikita Tiwari, product lead, Dehaat, former co-founder and director, NeerX, which was recently acquired by DeHaat, believes that the RDI scheme has the potential to be a real inflection point for Indian agritech. NeerX (now DeHaat) is actively involved in developing a precision advisory engine that integrates sensor data, weather models, satellite imagery and AI to deliver crop-stage-specific, hyperlocal recommendations to farmers. This spans across irrigation management, nutrient optimisation, and early detection of pest and disease risks. At the company, the core R&D is in real-time soil and crop monitoring systems (validated by ISRO). “Post-acquisition, at DeHaat, we are scaling that work to pan-India use cases and integrating it with DeHaat’s system to impact more than 13 million farmers,” says Tiwari. Roughly 20 to 25 percent of the company’s operational budget remains dedicated to R&D, covering in-house research, field trials and data-modelling infrastructure.

Nikita Tiwari, Product Lead, DeHaat (formerly cofounder & director, NeerX). Nikita is seen with Shool, India's most advanced portable sensor for soil and crop monitoring invented by her and Harsh Agrawal. Image: Madhu Kapparath

Working in the sector for a few years now, Tiwari sees several critical gaps that hinder agritech innovation and can be filed with the RDI scheme. Access to high-quality labelled field data remains fragmented and expensive. Pilot testing infrastructure, especially across varied agro-climatic zones which is limited and uncoordinated, slows down scaling innovation beyond lab prototypes. Additionally, there is a talent gap when it comes to experienced agri-data scientists, crop modellers, and embedded system engineers. “This RDI scheme can help bridge these by enabling collaborative research zones, shared testbeds, and funding support for industry-academia partnerships to train and retain agri-tech talent,” adds Tiwari, who is also planning to apply for the RDI scheme for DeHaat.

Also read: Agritech startups have arrived. What will it take to scale impact and profits?

Mark Kahn, managing partner, Omnivore, believes that the recent scheme, with its Rs1 lakh crore corpus and emphasis on concessional financing, could absorb some of the financial risk that the private sector faces, and offer longer time horizons. "It can encourage patient exploration of advanced tech, nudge VCs and corporates to back frontier architects, and enable entrepreneurs to move beyond SaaS or aggregation models toward hardware, biotech and platform-level innovations. Specifically, for the agritech sector, he is of the view that there’s enormous talent, both in science and engineering, but it’s not flowing into agriculture. Kahn explains that the consideration here is that India does not lack ideas, instead there's a gap in scaffolding for those ideas to grow by gaining access to capital without the constant pressure to scale prematurely, easier collaboration with research labs, testbeds to trial products, and a culture that rewards original IP creation. “The new R&D scheme, if implemented thoughtfully, could stitch these missing pieces together.”

The only caveat, as per Kahn is: Will agritech be treated as a strategic domain on par with semiconductors or defence tech? Will early-stage startups have equal access to this capital? “If the answer is yes, then the scheme could unlock a golden decade for Indian agricultural science," says Kahn. He further explains that today there are dozens of early-stage science outfits in India with breakthrough ideas in frontier biotech, AI-driven phenotyping, precision robotics or bio-inputs. "What they don’t have is the ability to go from paper to prototype without burning out or selling out. This scheme could finally give them a shot [at glory]," he concludes.