Digging Deeper...

Last month the Wall Street Journal ran a feature piece (May 9, 2024) suggesting that India’s economic emergence and development is reaching for greater heights. The WSJ reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently had praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for having “done an unbelievable job.”  The article also quoted Tim Cook, Apple CEO, describing the country “as an incredibly exciting market.” Warren Buffett claimed India holds “unexplored opportunities for Berkshire Hathaway.” And Elon Musk, it was noted, is planning to visit India later this year. But an Overland Park, Kansas, company has already established itself as an important cog powering India’s ag industry engine.
By Dennis McLaughlin, McLaughlin Writers LLC – Sources: Brian Barrett, senior vice president, global marketing, OTSI; Joel Whitaker, director strategic accounts, OTSI; The Hindu, November 3, 2023; Lancelot Joseph, executive editor, Business India, June 24, 2022; Sean Ross, Investopedia, April 17, 2024.

Kansas Tech Company Is Modernizing India’s Ag Industry

Founded 25 years ago as a minority-owned business and headquartered in Overland Park, KS, Object Technology Solutions, Inc. (OTSI), is a global information technology services company.

OTSI has a strong presence in North America, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, and has a global delivery center based in Hyderabad, India. It is focused on specific industry segments, such as banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, energy/utilities, engineering, telecom, transportation, and government. The global company excels in business transformation with emerging technologies such as Data & Analytics, AI and Machine Learning, Cloud Services, Digital Transformation & Automation, and Enterprise Applications.

OTSI has been engaged for several years with India’s Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (MAFW) developing a unified portal known as the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics (UPAg). The portal was introduced in September 2023 and represents a substantial leap toward revolutionizing India’s agricultural sector, said Brian Barrett, Senior Vice President Global Marketing.

MAFW is India’s equivalent to the United States Department of Agriculture. It could be said, though, that MAFW faces a more daunting task. While USDA deals with about 2 million farmers, MAFW oversees the collection of data from some 146.5 million growers and producers. Agriculture accounts for around 17% of India’s GDP; output from America’s farms represents only 0.7%. (Note:  The overall contribution of agriculture to GDP extends beyond these percentages, as sectors related to agriculture rely on agricultural inputs to add value to the economy. These related sectors include food and beverage manufacturing, food and beverage stores, food services and eating/drinking places, textiles, apparel, and leather products, as well as forestry and fishing – which comes to about 5.6%, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service, 2023.)

Making data harvesting more complex, India is the world’s second largest producer of total calorie content and is second globally in agricultural output valued at $524 billion in 2022, according to Statistica, May 15, 2021. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugar cane, fruit, vegetables cotton and ground nuts. India recently surpassed China as the largest country by population and can boast that it has the world’s second-highest agricultural output valued at $524.1 billion in 2022.

Actually, the UPAg project is not OTSI’s first venture in India. “We had the opportunity to bid on the UPAg project as a result of our earlier work on another data and analytics project, commissioned by India’s National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Ayog), called National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP).” says Joel Whitaker, Director Client Success. That project involved gathering data from disparate central, state, and local government ministries and compiling into one coherent cloud-based data structure and reporting engine for end users of all kinds. The platform aims to democratize access to publicly available government data and presents them coherently through intuitive tools for analytics and visualization to India’s vast population of 1.4B citizens.

Envisioned in 2020, the NDAP platform aims to standardize data across sources and provide flexible analytics that makes it easy for citizens, policymakers, academics, researchers, institutions, and international organizations to easily analyze data across more than 47 Central government agencies. The data-sets available on the portal have been selected, based on discussion with experts, on the most commonly used data required for various analyses. For instance, census, national family health survey, unified district information system for education data and such are available on the portal.  

How UPAg Works

Agricultural data in India is collected through various sources, including government surveys, agricultural censuses, and satellite imagery. MAFW is responsible for gathering and analyzing the data. In many agricultural data gathering initiatives, field agents are deployed to interact directly with farmers. These agents typically visit farms offline to collect various types of data such as crop details, land size, yield estimates, farming practices, and socio-economic information. The agents may use mobile apps or paper-based forms to record this data during their visits.

Because of limited internet connectivity in rural areas, offline data collection methods are commonly employed. Agents gather data using mobile devices equipped with offline-capable apps or paper forms. This allows them to collect data even when internet connectivity is unavailable. Once agents have collected the necessary data, they upload it to a central database or platform when they have internet access. This upload process can occur via mobile data networks or Wi-Fi hotspots, enabling real-time or periodic synchronization of collected data. Some digital platforms or systems empower farmers themselves to enter their own data. This could be through farmer-facing mobile apps or web interfaces, allowing farmers to directly input information about their farming activities, crop yields, or other relevant data points.

Remodeling India Agriculture

At the MAFW’s unveiling of UPAg last September, The Hindu, India’s 146- year-old English-language daily newspaper, reported that OTSI had established itself as a global IT services company “with an unwavering commitment to innovation and excellence.” The Hindu called UPAg’s technology “ground-breaking.”

The UPAg portal combines meticulous design and development to facilitate the mission of gathering and processing agricultural data.  “In a world where subjective judgments often cloud decision-making in agriculture, UPAg aims to infuse stability, transparency and informed choices into the sector,” says Chandra Talluri, OTSI’s Global CEO. It is a visionary platform that offers a comprehensive solution to the problems faced by the agricultural community. Key capabilities of the portal OTSI built for India’s MAFW include automated crop production estimates, insights into agricultural trends, data sharing, and comprehensive general data gathering.

The UPAg portal is a milestone in the agricultural sector, serving as a comprehensive and reliable source of data and analytics, notes Talluri. It has the potential to significantly enhance decision-making and outcomes in agriculture by providing real-time, standardized and credible information. Talluri adds that the portal promises to usher in a new era of transparency and efficiency in India’s agricultural policies.

OTSI has analyzed and processed more than 30,000 source files from various departments and combined them into 203 datasets “We continue working on getting more datasets to be on boarded onto the platform,” Talluri adds. “We take every measure to make sure that backend architecture is scalable and resilient to cater to the future needs of India.”