Reuters Market Light Amit Mehra

Report

A presentation by Amit Mehra, founder and managing director of Reuters Market Light (RML), describing the service’s origins as a personalised, local-language SMS subscription service delivering crop prices, agricultural news, advisory tips and district-level weather forecasts to Indian farmers. Tracing RML’s development from ethnographic research with eight farmers in early 2006 through market trials with thousands of farmers to a full go-to-market launch in Maharashtra, the presentation quantifies the impact as $20-100 million in additional farmer productivity gains and outlines the ecosystem of partnerships — with credit societies, handset makers, telecom operators, banks and agri-input companies — built to support the business.