Indian Agriculture must embrace biotech crops & regulated markets

India has less than 4% of World’s arable land but it has to feed 18% of the global population. With Yields per hectare of food grains, fruits and vegetables far below global averages and 80% of landholdings being less than two acres, it is essential to find economically viable solutions to improve farmer incomes.

Agriculture has been the mainstay of the Indian economy and during these times of recession, a concerted effort for increasing agricultural productivity through technology infusion and market-led interventions is the need of the hour.

Technologies for higher production and productivity, energy saving, environment protection etc. needs to be infused into the sector.

BIOTECH CROPS

The global spread of biotech crops has been recognized as the fastest spread agricultural technology to date (A 94-fold increase in hectarage from 1.7m hectares in 1996 to 160m hectares in 2011 – 15% more than area cultivated in India). Nearly 30 countries grow genetically modified crops of soybean, cotton, maize and other crops across all continents.

So far India has benefited only from Bt. Cotton. However, development of biotech crops for a wide variety of crops is progressing all over the country in both public and private sector.

COMMODITIES MARKETS

Agri-business can transform Indian agriculture, but there are too many challenges that inhibit greater investment. The commodities market is very volatile and is often affected by weather, local and global trade policies and human conflicts.

We need to create a value chain for each agri-commodity. In the context of emerging food processing and feed industries, it is essential to consider how food and feed production can be stabilized with assured and enhanced income to farmers without too much price rise as also through employment generation. For this, biotech crops and their public acceptance holds the key.

Current estimate of benefit to India with a single biotech crop is about US$ 15bn. The need is a definite change in the mind-set and greater acceptance of technology to change the image of Indian agriculture which is often blamed for lower growth rates.

We need more efforts to build public awareness of benefits of such new biotech products through NGOs and other regulatory bodies and make the public know that the regulatory system in the country is one of the most stringent in the world and as such there is no room for undue fear.

If the policy environment is supportive, India can set an example of new bio-economy to the rest of the world, especially to the developing one.

Cautious "Cloud" critical for Indian BPO Industry

Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) Industry in India is up against yet another challenge in 2012 – The Euro Crisis. Though challenges are not new to this industry, the current scenario assumes significance in the wake of the global economy facing the Euro crisis much before the scars of 2008 US recession faded out.

Backed by factors like cost advantage due to the abundant availability of skilled manpower, infrastructure and fiscal incentives offered by the State, BPO industry has had a decent run till 2008 with ‘attrition’ being the only major thorn in the flesh.

Analysts had in the past and even now advise BPOs to move to lower-cost delivery centres as a means to improve their profitability but the industry has its own concerns for the lack of ‘Quality’ workforce in Tier-II cities.

As a result, BPOs are increasingly focusing on reducing costs within the existing framework which, calls for diversity in the way the companies are looking at business.

A majority of the BPOs who till date were primarily engaged in serving multi-million dollar deals with high transactional and operational costs will now be looking at smaller and shorter contracts, profits for which, can be booked within 6-12 month period.

The above strategy of booking profits in the short-term will give the BPOs the flexibility to scale up in those parts of their business where growth is occurring and to scale back their operational count in areas where levels of business and transactions are declining.

The advent of advanced technologies like “BPaaS” (Business Processing As A Service) on “Cloud” (The practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server) also helps BPOs to serve the clients better without much investment on infrastructure.

Not only will “BPaaS” be effective in serving small time clients, it will also be helpful in enhancing the already existing core systems and processes and applying the same to those processes where there was minimal process and technology in the past.

In future, BPOs will look at BPaaS not only to service the smaller clientele as above, but also to run their social media campaigns for sales & customer service process optimization.

Be it customer engagement or finding new business, social media through multi-channel outbound notifications can proactively identify issues and resolve them. This cost effective medium will also be used by the BPOs to attract more and more customers to their list.

There is no denial of the fact that in this period of global recession customers are definitely looking for more at lower budgets. BPOs that identify problem areas of clients, provide specialized services, verticalize, optimize their infrastructure and resources through consolidation and are inclined towards new technologies like virtualization/cloud will survive the current tide.

The future belongs to those BPOs which will cautiously embed cloud sourcing into their traditional outsourcing model.