Through Krish-e, Mahindra aims to offer affordable and accessible farming technologies and services to over 2 million farmers, enabling the company to engage with them throughout the entire value chain of farming – right from offering advisory services, selling inputs like seeds and pesticides, and offering mechanised equipment and tractors on rent via a subscription or pay-per-use model.
Launched just around the time of the Covid pandemic, Mahindra is expecting Krish-e to grow its GMV four to five times from its current base of $40 million.
With an Omni channel approach, Krish-e services can be available through the Krish-e suite of digital apps, the Krish-e call centre and through over 100 Krish-e dealers. The company eventually wants to extend Krish-e to all 2,000 Mahindra & Swaraj dealers.
Ramesh Ramachandran, SVP, farming as a service head (FAAS) of farm sector strategy at Mahindra & Mahindra, said the tractor market is getting increasingly competitive and the idea was how Krish-E can help Mahindra approach the customer in a differentiated manner and affect the lives positively at every step of farming.
“The FAAS exists to improve the income per acre for the farmer and others in the agricultural ecosystem, so it’s very focused on income improvement in a sustainable manner, primarily for the farmer, but also for service providers to inform others in the agricultural ecosystem, where Mahindra plays a role of catalyst,” said Ramachandran.
India has about 2 million tractor rental entrepreneurs. It is a large unorganised market with roughly about ₹30,000 crore of business done annually. Ramachandran believes the rental farming solutions will open the market for advanced farm machinery as well as the precision farming market, which is still largely undefined.
Krish-e was formed by bringing together different parts of the Mahindra group or farm equipment business and integrated to offer a coherent value proposition to the farmers. Samriddhi, the advisory service from Mahindra Agri Solutions, My AgriGuru App, Tractor rental arm Trringo and the precision farming decision, all came together under Krish-E to offer a comprehensive ones-top shop solution three years ago.
Ramachandran says with agriculture increasingly becoming technology intensive, over the last few years, Mahindra has worked with several startups across the agri-value chain.
Mahindra spends significantly in piloting joint projects and comprehensive incubation programmes with startups and invested in some of them.
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