Mumbai, Jan 7 :Emphasising on the key role played by innovation in green and white revolution, Dr Trilochan Mohapatra, Secretary (DARE) & Director General, ICAR on Friday said that nurturing agri innovations is imperative for agricultural development.
Addressing the 4th edition of ‘FICCI Agri Startup Summit & Awards’, Mohapatra said, “The evolving technologies and agri innovations are to be mainstreamed and deployed in the fields.”
He further said that there is a need to incubate the start-ups and entrepreneurs, and this is critical to address the challenges of agriculture and allied sectors.
“There is a lot of opportunity to link farmers to market and startups have huge potential in this area,” he said.
Mohaptra mentioned that there has to be efficiency, climate resilience and high productivity with quality and we need more and more players to be part of it. “Partnership and collaboration are key in today’s world to take agriculture to next level,” he added.

Speaking at the occasion, Neelkamal Darbari, MD, Small Farmers’ Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), said that the timing is apt to leverage technologies for the small and marginal farmers.
The government has already launched the e-NAM (National Agriculture Market) which is a pan-India electronic trading portal which networks the existing APMC mandis to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities.
“The government has already integrated 1,000 mandis and 1.72 crore farmers are already registered with the portal along with 2 lakh traders. The next step will be to integrate 1,000 more mandis with the portal,” she added.
She further stated that the government is also planning to create platform of platforms. This will link up all the portals available in the country for all activities related to the farming sector. This will also create greater synergy for the farmers to reduce the cost of operations and improve pricing for the product, Darbari added.(UNI)