Deadline: 15-Jul-22
The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) has announced a call for proposals for boosting farmers’ income from start-ups and sme’s under agri-grand challenge.
The Agri-Grand Challenge (AgGC), an initiative of BIRAC in partnership with IKP Knowledge Park (IKP), aims to identify and fast-track technology driven solutions that are almost ready to deploy and are scalable to help boost farmers’ income especially marginal and small land holding farmers.
The focus of this Challenge will be to demonstrate increased revenues through deployment of selected technologies. To ensure impact, the selected innovations/start-ups in Stage 2 of the program, will test multiple crops in two agro-climatic zones and will include small and middle landholding farmers.
The AgGC will enable the selected entrepreneurs to test, refine and validate their solutions for rapid deployment in the market through expert mentorship and connecting with relevant commercial partners to aid the accelerated development, scale-up and distribution of their solutions.
Proposals are invited in the following fields:
- Quality Inputs (seeds, planting material and crop-nutrition products) – product and distribution innovations
- Genome edited plants under SDN1 and SDN2 category
- Pest and Disease Management
- Resource Management (soil and water sensors, water conservation, soil health, soil microbes and crops interaction for healthy and sustainable farming, etc.)
- Bio-stimulants, bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides
- Quality assessment of agricultural output
- Weed control technologies
- Efficient Biologicals production technologies
- Farm Mechanization and Pervasive Automation
- Digital Farming/Smart Agriculture (Precision and Digital agriculture, AI/ML-based, UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), sensors, robots, weather prediction, vertical farming, organic farming, etc)
- Genomics knowledge driven precision breeding for climate resilient agriculture
- Harvesting and Post-harvest Loss Management3
- Farm level storage, processing and value addition, warehousing
- Livestock technology in areas including dairy, fisheries/aqua, goatry and piggery, feed and feed supplements, quality assessment tools for dairy and other products, etc.
- Agri-fintech solutions to enable financing to small holder farmers
- Emerging agricultural technologies (Blockchain, SaaS Technologies, traceability solutions, etc.)
- Other allied areas
Eligibility Criteria
The proposals can be submitted:
- Solely by a start-up, SME or Company incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013 or Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) incorporated under the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 or Joint Ventures either in the form of Company/ LLP or
- By any of the above entities in collaboration with other private or public partners (Universities or Institutes).
- Minimum 51% of the shares of the Company should be held by Indian Citizens holding Indian passport (Indian Citizens do not include Person of Indian Origin (PIO) and Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) holders)
- Minimum half of the persons who subscribed their names to the LLP document as its Partners should be Indian citizens.
The Applicant Company/LLP/Startup should either:
- Have adequate in-house facility to address the project implementation
- Incubated with any of the recognized Incubation Facility
For Academic collaborator:
- Eligible Academia shall mean an entity which is having proper establishment documents
- For Public or Private Institute, University, NGO, or Research Foundation, proper registration/accreditati on from a government body is mandatory like UGC affiliation certification, AICTE, CSIR /DSIR/SIRO certificate etc.
For more information, visit https://birac.nic.in/cfp_view.php?id=72&scheme_type=43