Agtech startup Bharat Intelligence target to become ‘Urban Company’ in horticulture

Mumbai-based agtech startup Bharat Intelligence aims to emerge as the “Urban Company” in horticulture by connecting farmers with agricultural workers, its founders, Azhaan Merchant and Gourav Sanghai, have said. 

As part of this, the company began offering skilled farm workers to grape farmers in the Nashik region two months ago. It plans to do a similar exercise for bananas from January in Maharashtra’s Solapur region, they said in an online interaction with businessline. 

“What we are trying to do is create an end-to-end solution. Think of it like a marketplace, like what Urban Company has done. We are trying to do something similar for the agrarian economy,” said Merchant.

AI-powered platform

Bharat Intelligence has come up with an artificial intelligence-powered platform connecting farmers and agriculture workers through a simple WhatsApp interface, said Sanghai. 

“The platform aims to make labour availability predictable, fair, and efficient, addressing both sides of the crisis. It gives farmers timely access to skilled workers when they need them most. Farm labourers, on the other hand, get higher income, have increased mobility, with their job profiles matched by data,” he said. 

The workers are now earning on average ₹800 rupees per day compared with around ₹600  earlier. The payment is made the same day.  

Merchant and Sanghai benefited a lot from watching India’s largest farmer-producer company (F_C), Sahaydri Farms, which recently invested ₹7 crore in the startup. This also means that all the 22,500 farmer-shareholders of the FPC hold stakes in the company. 

Lack of skilled hands

“We spent a lot of time with their senior leadership and their farmers,” said Merchant.

One of the problems that farmers cultivating grapes in the Nashik region faced was the lack of skilled farmhands. There are at least 7 lakh tribal migrant workers who come from the interior parts of the region. 

With Sahaydri Farms increasing the area under grapes to 1.5 lakh acres, the need for agricultural workers has increased rapidly. 

“Labour wages have been increasing 10-15 per cent annually. No one is skilling these labourers. There is no formal player that is, frankly, organising this workforce. So farmers are complaining,” said Merchant.

Managing payments, reviews

Bharat Intelligence has enrolled about 1,000 labourers to work on the grape farms. “We are planning to build that now to about 10,000 in the next 12 months,” he said.

The feature of this enrolment is that the retention of the workers by farmers is over 90 per cent. “So, it highlights the problem of farm labour,” said Merchant.

Besides managing the workers’ payments and service, the company also manages rating reviews to provide them with “upscaling opportunities”.

While farmers are seeking workers with skills to work on their grape farms, labourers, on the other hand, are looking for better wages. Also, labour availability is sensitive since the window for tending to the plants is very narrow. 

‘Labour calendar’

Sanghai said  1.5 million workers come to Baramati from Marathwada for sugarcane harvesting. Banana farmers too need workers for harvest, and they come from West Bengal. Mango farmers get workers from Nepal. 

Once Bharat Intelligence has certain data points on the farmers, their area, the crop variety they are planting and various dates of planting activities, it builds a “labour calendar”.

“This will say when specification operations need to be done on a horticulture farm. We can extrapolate it to the panchayat level to figure out the overall requirement, and mapping the labour demand is then easy,” he said. 

“Some workers complain that there are no jobs. Some say they get paid less than the minimum wage. Some workers lament that there is no recognition of their past work. There are no upskilling programmes, even from the government side,” said Merchant. 

Uniform classification

Among labourers, some do menial jobs locally, and there are some who migrate for a certain period of the year. “Both sides of the ecosystem are completely broken. Not speaking to each other is a classic visibility issue. Frankly,  people are just looking at their surrounding neighbourhood, their village, and concluding that there is no labour availability,” he said. 

The supply side of providing farm workers is a struggle. “The problem is even those registered under eShram, the national database of organised workers, and MNREGA classify all agricultural labourers as one class,” said Sanghia.

The workers are not classified by their specialisation, like a banana harvester or grape farm worker. On the other hand, getting to train the workers in grape operations wasn’t simple.

So, the company talked to Tata Strive, which provides skills training. Tata Strive and the startup are now co-building a scaling programme to train different types of skilled farm labourers. It will equip the workers with the right tools and show them how to perform some of the key operations. 

Tools skilling

“For example, for grape blasting, the workers were applying hydrogen cyanide manually, which left their hands purple and led to skin rashes and allergies. Now, the workers have been provided proper equipment and gloves,” said Merchant.

Such skilling has helped increase their efficiency three to four times in terms of pace and productivity. The company is also trying to solve fruiting problems in bananas, something that has been unsolved for years now. 

For bananas, Bharat Intelligence is working with international entities in the Philippines, learning from their package of practices. It is also working with buyers such as Iraq on its requirements for grapes.

“We are creating a backward plan to essentially figure out what activities need to be done, what tooling is required for that, and then creating a full package for that,” said Merchant.

For banana farmers, the objective of the company would be to improve the overall quality of the bananas to increase the export market share. 

Other plans

“There’s a big premium that buyers are willing to pay, almost 20, if proper care is taken. An activity that may cost about ₹0.50 per kilo will guarantee the farmer almost ₹2-₹2.50 additional returns from the buyer. From the farmers’ side, we just have to introduce standard operating procedures and run the experiment,” said Merchant.  

Sanghia said initially, the startup had difficulties in convincing farmers. However, once it targeted active job cards in MNREGA, the company began to get things right.  

After bananas, Bharat Intelligence could look at opportunities in onions, tomatoes and pomegrantes. “We also need to take a decision on serving mango growers,” said Merchant.  

Published on December 22, 2025