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In a landmark move for India’s agriculture-led economy, Bharat Intelligence announced that over 22,500 farmers have joined as shareholders through Sahyadri Farms, India’s largest Farmer Producer Company, supporting the company’s mission to integrate AI into India’s offline economy to enhance rural livelihoods.
The company’s first focus is the farm labour crisis, one of the most pressing challenges for Indian agriculture. Farmers struggle to secure timely labour, while workers face uncertainty and lack of dignity. Bharat Intelligence’s platform predicts labour needs and connects farmers with skilled crews through simple, vernacular interfaces. For farmers, this means reliable support when it matters most; for workers, steady jobs and protection. Behind the scenes, the system functions as a sensor network into the rural economy, powering what the company calls “Bharat’s Thinking Engine.”
While global AI has raced ahead, it remains largely digital-first, trained on online ecosystems. This approach falls short in India, where much of the economy is lived in fields, markets, and villages. By embedding technology into rural workflows, Bharat Intelligence captures the trust signals, seasonal rhythms, and community networks that conventional datasets miss—ensuring AI can finally serve the realities of Bharat’s economy.
“India’s economy is agrarian, deeply physical, and cannot be understood from the cloud alone. To build AI for India, it must be embedded in rural life—attuned to the nuance of a handshake in a village market, the seasonal migration of workers balancing dual livelihoods, and the trust networks that quietly govern transactions,” said Azhaan Merchant, Co-Founder & CEO of Bharat Intelligence. “You cannot algorithmise what you do not understand. Our mission is to build that foundation of India’s physical economy, so AI can unlock the next wave of prosperity.”
For Sahyadri Farms, which unites thousands of horticulture growers across Maharashtra, the partnership is about making technology meaningful at the grassroots.
Vilas Shinde, Chairman and Managing Director of Sahyadri Farms, said,“At Sahyadri, we believe that making farming sustainable and profitable requires interventions across the entire value chain from market access to post-harvest solutions and farm-level innovations. Labour availability has become one of the most pressing challenges for our farmers, particularly in horticulture. Through our investment in Bharat Intelligence, we are not only addressing this critical issue with the power of AI, but also empowering thousands of farmers to become shareholders in the technology shaping their future. This partnership reflects our conviction that real transformation happens when farmers are at the centre of innovation.”
The technical vision, led by CTO Gourav Sanghai, centres on empathy as much as computation. “Our AI is not just processing data; it’s learning to understand people. We’re designing models that empathise with Bharat’s users, why a farmer in Nashik prunes on a specific day, or how a migrant worker from Odisha decides where to find work,” said Sanghai. “This ‘phygital intelligence’—AI that fuses physical context with digital computation—is about building technology that recognises and responds to real human needs. That empathy and context is what will define the next generation of AI for emerging economies.”
By rooting itself in India’s physical economy, Bharat Intelligence is solving urgent problems while laying the groundwork for long-term transformation. The company believes that the context layer is the missing building block for AI in India, ensuring that as artificial intelligence evolves, even toward AGI, it remains grounded in the lived reality of its billion users.
