Dvara Doordrishti – revolutionizing agricultural insight with digital technology

Learning outcomes The learning outcomes are as follows: to understand the stakeholders involved, their relationships and challenges in the agriculture value chain; understand how decisions are made using data generated by the farmers in the agriculture value chain to add more outreach and inclusivity; and apply a structured approach to digital transformation to offer bouquet of services for the Farmer Producer Organizations & Farmers to make them efficacious & sustainable. Case overview/synopsis Dvara E-Registry (DER) was a portfolio company of Dvara Holdings and part of the Dvara Venture Studio cohort that supported entrepreneurs working towards large-scale systemic changes in financial inclusion. Over the years, Dvara had touched the lives of millions of rural low-income households most of whom are farmers. This case study is about Dvara and the critical challenges faced by smallholder farmers and FPOs in India. Mr Tarun Katoch and Mr Senthil Kumar, co-founders at Dvara, took up the challenge and were working towards DER becoming the financial inclusion and productivity enabling platform for all stakeholders in the agricultural value chain by providing farm level analytics and actionable insights by harnessing the transformative power of artificial intelligence, remote sensing and emerging technologies. The dilemma that faced Tarun and Senthil was that how could a scoring model be developed to ensure financial inclusion of marginal farmers? How could they scale up to impact more farmers? What technology could help and how could they proceed? This case study talks about the pain points and inefficiencies faced by small farmers and FPOs helping them and how a digital transformation would help them create better efficiencies, higher productivity and financial inclusion. Complexity academic level Post graduate courses in Technology and Management. Supplementary material Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.