InDepth | Twin Benefits: Agriculture And Health Care Can Benefit Immensely from AI

India is on the cusp of a technological revolution with AI underpinning the next wave of transformation across enterprises. Agriculture and health care are two critical areas that can benefit immensely from AI adoption. A large chunk of India’s population still depends on agriculture for its livelihood and the last mile remains a challenge for health-care delivery. There is a debate among experts on whether India should focus on building the compute infrastructure that supports large language models or spend resources on the application layer and prioritise use cases.

Health Checks

The government has already brought AI-powered chatbots closer to India’s farmers and health-care workers. The Kisan e-Mitra and National Pest Surveillance System are leveraging the power of AI to make things better for farmers and that too in local languages.

India has built an extensive network of primary health centres and community health centres to reach the interiors, but providing quality health care at every doorstep in the remotest parts is a problem that AI promises to solve.

CureBay, a health-tech start-up in Odisha, is using AI technology to bridge the last-mile delivery gap in India’s health-care system. The company shared a use-case on how it is deploying AI to make health-care delivery more effective and improve outcomes.

According to CureBay, “Anaemia is a good example. It is one of the most overlooked conditions in rural India. With CureBay SmartVitals, a 30-second video of the face is enough for our AI to estimate haemoglobin along with heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen levels. No needle, no lab visit. Our swasthya mitras [community health workers] can run it at a family’s doorstep, and a reading that looks off brings that person into the eClinic for a confirmatory test and a doctor’s consult. More than 50,000 SmartVitals reports have been generated so far.”

Leg-up for Farmers

From precision farming that leverages technology to guide farmers by providing advisories in local languages to improving the quality of animal nutrition, AI has found its way to every stage of India’s agriculture value chain.

For instance, a Gurgaon-based technology start-up that bridges the gap between a poultry farm and a consumer uses data to improve forecasting, internet-of-things devices for early identification of potential diseases among other issues. It is also developing a platform for farmers that will use data from farm clusters to enable best practices and knowledge sharing, and help improve operations.

“Eggoz is a technology company at heart. AI and technology are valuable when they create tangible improvements on the ground, helping farmers make better decisions, improving operational efficiency, making demand and supply more predictable, strengthening quality management and creating greater transparency across the journey of an egg,” says its co-founder and chief executive, Abhishek Negi.

Bengaluru-based start-up Cropin’s OrbitAI has been trained on real-world data like soil health, weather forecasts, crop yield and demand forecasting, among many other datasets. A farmer can take its help to safeguard against a pest infestation and a sourcing manager can use it to check if the yield for a particular crop will be adequate.

India can champion the AI application layer and its success will be determined by how effectively the pilots it is deploying are helping improve outcomes for its people. Amid the race for powerful AI models, India is sitting at a vantage point and its strong talent pool plus a robust start-up ecosystem can leverage technology to bring an impact at population scale.

Ankit Saproo is Editor–Special Projects, Outlook Business