I was once talking to one of the oldest heads in agriculture who had later moved into agritech. Everyone knows him but not sharing names here.
He has lately been a little pessimistic about the future and impact of agritech. I counted off all that I had read and the immense potential for growth.
He gave me a simple simile. He asked me what was behind the IT exports boom in India? I said a huge pool of talent, better skills and cost effective delivery models etc etc.
He said I was wrong to think that. India didn’t export software or service. India exported coders – humans. That was our forte. We had too many and others didn’t have enough. He also said we in agritech got wrongly inspired trying to imitate that boom in agritech – the huge margins just didn’t exist in agriculture.
I thought it was an odd argument. But after an agreement to send 10000 construction workers to Israel, Indian cabinet has now approved another agreement to send thousands to Italy. Under the agreement, India will send 12,000 non-seasonal workers & 8000 seasonal workers to Italy every year.
Combine this with almost weekly news of Indians being caught at global borders trying to illegal enter the developed world.
I am sure those who want to twist news to suit their narratives will twist this to paint an emerging India picture too. But show me American, European or Japanese citizens being exported as labourers or trying to illegally enter other countries. India is the outlier in G5 despite being a large economy.
If you can understand this dichotomy, it will better inform your market understanding and revenue projections etc. If you can’t, you will be stuck at the glass ceiling like hundreds of D2C companies.
The problem is for long we thought data was the solution. Intelligent and objective analysis of that data can’t be done by software or tools. Even AI replicates human bias. And, human bias is as much a threat to data intelligence as inaccurate data.
