Chitkara startup ‘Sickle Innovations’ wins FICCI Business Excellence Award

Chitkara Innovation Incubator Startup “Sickle Innovations” won “FICCI Business Excellence Award” for the “Best Innovative Agri-Startup 2018″ at the International Conference & Business Excellence Awards for Innovations by Agri Startups” on November 16, 2018, at FICCI, Federation House, New Delhi. One of the major components of the International Conference is felicitation of Business Excellence Awards to select Agri Startups who have done a commendable ground-level innovative intervention in the Agriculture sector.

Mr Suresh Prabhu, Minister of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, released the FICCI-PwC Knowledge Report on ‘Agri-Start-ups: Innovations for boosting the Future of Agriculture in India’ and also gave away the ‘Business Excellence Awards for Innovations by Agri Start-ups’.

The objective of the International Conference & Business Excellence Awards is to sensitize, motivate, address the policy issues that agri-startups face so that they innovatively solve the problems faced by the Indian Agriculture across the value chain.

This year, the International Conference focused on the theme of “Innovations in Agriculture” and broadly covered deliberations around global partnership in agri-innovations, digitizing agriculture with geospatial technologies and building innovative post-harvest management. The International Conference also witnessed inspiring innovative lessons from various cross-sectoral leaders and International best innovative success stories.
Speaking at the ‘International Conference & Awards for Innovations by Agri Startups’ organised by FICCI, Mr Suresh Prabhu said that to promote new innovations and ideas, start-up companies in the agriculture sector should be encouraged. He emphasized that India needs to produce more but there is a threat to existing products and this is going to be an extremely important issue. Agri innovation is the most important innovation the world would need in the field of agriculture at various levels and in different forms, added.
He said start-ups could use technology and bring innovations in areas such as making land and soil more fertile; producing agriculture from wastewater; minimal use of fertilizers and pesticides and better productivity.
During the conference, Mr Alexandre Ziegler, Ambassador of France to India, highlighted the strong relationship between India and France, especially in the agriculture sector. He said that France has already started using hi-end technologies like drones, artificial intelligence, big data etc. to ensure increase the productivity and invited Indian companies to invest in France.

Mr T R Kesavan, Chairman, FICCI National Agriculture Committee & President and COO, TAFE Ltd. said that areas such as farm to the farm head; farm at storages and storage to markets were crucial areas where agri-startups can use innovations. It was imperative for start-ups to adopt sustainable business models to help the farm sector.

Mr Pravesh Sharma, Adviser – FICCI Agriculture Division and CEO Kamatan Farm Tech Pvt. Ltd. stressed the need for creating an ecosystem for the sustainability of start-ups and emphasized the need for using disruptive technologies in the agriculture sector.