BigHaat, a Bengaluru-based digital Agri platform that provides end-to-end farming solutions, plans to onboard over a million Tamil Nadu farmers in the next year. Tamil Nadu has been identified as a potential state. Farmers in the state are extremely forward-thinking and adaptable to new technologies.
"We want to bring at least one million farmers into our digital ecosystem in the next 12 months," said Sachin Nandwana, Co-Founder and Director of BigHaat.
"We are attempting to establish an omnichannel presence in Tamil Nadu by establishing field presence in many districts." We are already seeing significant interest from districts such as Dharmapuri, Dindigul, Kanchipuram, Madurai, and Erode in areas of horticulture, plantations and field crops,” he added.
BigHaat recently launched its mobile application in Tamil, allowing the State's farming community to access products and services on the platform as well as receive personalized advice in the local language. Previously, the app was only available in Telugu, Hindi, and English.
BigHaat, founded in 2015 by farming families Sateesh Nukala and Sachin Nandwana, is a direct-to-farmer digital platform that transforms the entire agriculture value chain from pre-harvest to post-harvest by leveraging data, technology, and crop science.
Initially, the platform focused on resolving pre-harvest challenges faced by the farming community in Karnataka. The agri-tech platform began by offering seeds for a wide range of horticulture and field crops and later expanded its portfolio to include a variety of other products such as insecticides, pesticides, and fertilizers, crop nutrients, etc.
"We could build India's largest portfolio of seeds across horticulture and field crops in almost three years." "Once we established the seed supply chain, we began offering a variety of other categories based on the expertise and experience gained through our interactions with farmers," Nandwana explained.
In collaboration with banks and financial institutions, BigHaat has evolved into a full-stack platform, offering end-to-end farming solutions such as machinery and farm equipment rental, post-harvest accessories, market linkages, loans, and insurance to rural customers and farmers.
"Today, we have over 300 brands on the platform with over 7,000 SKUs across all product and service categories," Nandwana said. According to Nandwana, over seven million farmers have used BigHaat's services since its inception, and over a million active users/farmers use the platform each month.
"In the last 24 months, we've seen a 10- 15 fold increase in user base. We are at a tipping point, and we will continue to see this kind of growth in the next 5-10 years, given the rapid internet penetration and growing smartphone usage in rural India," Nandwana said.
