“The government of India is working seriously on this. Karnataka is also one of the lead players. The critical point here is data sharing. 200 lakh farmer plots are currently being photographed with geo-coordinates and identifying crops,” said Dr. Manoj Rajan, chief executive of the state’s agriculture and horticulture department.
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Rajan was responding to recommendations for setting up a sandbox by fellow panellists during a discussion on agriculture-related fintech services.
“In Karnataka, we have already all the enabling provisions to quickly start this sandbox. We can definitely have one or two pilots, maybe where we can tinker with all kinds of permutations and combinations, for example to solve for tenant farmers,” he said.
If successful, Karnataka’s sandbox would be the first such in the country for agriculture, which is a state subject in India.
Regulatory sandboxes, which allow for testing of new products or services in a controlled environment where certain relaxations are put in place, currently exist in domains of fintech (Reserve Bank of India-run) and Web3 (Telangana government-run) in the country.
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“We have the next meeting with the minister and many of the officials on bringing a sandbox concept under the Innovation Act. As soon as that’s done, we want to do it sooner than later because we’ve been discussing this for the last couple of weeks,” Sandhya Vasudevan, a board member of TiE part of the panel, said in response to ET’s question on a timeline on the sandbox.Vasudevan clarified that while the sandbox in the state has not been signed off by the government yet, there is interest and intent towards it. The idea was flagged off by Nipun Mehrotra, founder, The Agri Collaboratory, an agriculture-focussed think tank.
“It is not just the finance that the farmer needs, they need to increase their net realisation, their income to take away at the end of the year. In order to do that, we have to connect insurance with finance with input and output so that ultimately they benefit… a recommendation that I’m going to make for Karnataka is to establish a sandbox with the help of Manoj (Rajan) and the centre of excellence in Karnataka,” Mehrotra said.
The sandbox would help bring the industry together to co-create and solve problems, he added. “Maybe with the speed that you all work, Karnataka can have the first sandbox operation in India and have it announced in January,” he added.
