1.5 million. That’s how many schools there are for a country where half the population is below 25 years old. According to 2018-2019 data, India only had 37.4 million students enrolled in higher education, which suggests a high disparity between the number of schools vis-a-vis students. In March 2020, schools shuttered across the country, and the number of students in classrooms lowered even further to zero.

The vital, looming question became: What are Indian schools going to do to keep kids learning?

Educators who were hitherto tackling structural flaws plaguing the nation’s educational system — unviable sub-scale schools, a severe shortage of knowledgeable teachers, and non-interactive teaching methodology — suddenly found themselves struggling to rise to an immediate and burgeoning challenge. They were caught unprepared and crippled.

While they struggled, EdTech innovators were ready tap into the multibillion-dollar business opportunity with their tools and apps. One such success story is Mumbai-based Toppr, founded in 2013 by Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) alumnus Zishaan Hayath and Hemanth Gotet.

With the mission to “Make Learning Personalized”, Toppr provides students access to 24x7 e-learning, practice tests, and coaching from quality educators. While their video classes were always available as a free learning resource, in April 2020, Toppr made its live classes entirely free for all students in classes 5 to 12 from over 15 school boards.

Toppr has harnessed AI, machine learning, big data, and natural language processing to create a unique learning path and personalized improvement strategies for every child. This ensures a high-quality education for every child, even in the remotest parts of the country.

For a largely agrarian country, an acute shortage of clean water is the greatest crisis its population can face. Unfortunately, we are approaching that reality in India at an untenable speed.

In small villages across the country, accounts of households lacking basic amenities, handpumps going dry, unyielding contaminated land leading to farmer suicides are common.

Today, technological developments made by companies such as Vision Earth and Paterson Energy are making considerable advancements in water recycling and waste handling.

Vision Earthcare has over a hundred of its Soil Bio-Technology plants running across India with one single mission — to effectively and economically treat sewage and other industrial water waste. No odor, no chemicals, and minimal maintenance make this tech developed at IIT-Bombay apt for treating India’s problem. These plants recycle as much as 120 mega liters of waste water per day, and have positively impacted the lives of as many as 1.2 million people.

But with water, there is another problem — plastic litter that invariably finds a way into our precious water bodies.

To tackle this, Chennai-based Paterson Energy’s founder and director Vidya Amarnath pioneered Thermo Chemical Depolymerisation (TCD) — a technology that converts plastic waste into an industrial-grade fuel. Amarnath started the company in 2016 when she realized that only quality plastic is recycled and that it is at most only recycled twice. The remainder ends up in our oceans or a landfill.

Paterson Energy’s first plastic-to-fuel plant is in Tamil Nadu and has the capacity to convert five metric tons of waste into plastic oil every day for a city that produces a total of 220 metric tons of waste daily.

TCD is manufactured in plants with zero emissions and effluents and the resulting fuel produced, Verte-X, can replace furnace oil or diesel variants. This is cost-effective and multi-faceted solution can be used in heating and cooling solutions, to generate electricity, among other industries.

At the turn of the pandemic, Paterson Energy is making plans to study the composition of every new kind of plastic. “While the world is lauding the environmental rejuvenation due to lockdown, we as a startup are dealing with large amounts of plastic waste from PPEs,” shared Amarnath.

With the ambition to expand into more cities, waste management will become more effective, efficient and economical.

The Union Budget for 2020 by the Government of India focused on recovery of the agricultural sector. It includes a 16-point action plan to boost production, responsible consumption and address poverty in rural areas by working towards the goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022.

In addition, significant technological support from local startups and enterprises will see India’s food industry heading for a dramatic and transformational change.

In the early days of May 2020, India witnessed its worst locust swarm attack in over 25 years. All the way from the northern agricultural belt of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana to other states further south such as Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, there was unsurmountable crop damage. They say a single swarm (containing as many as 40 million locusts) can eat as much food as 35,000 people, 20 camels or six elephants — all in one day.

When monsoon season hits, these voracious feeders will again pose a threat to livestock and grasslands. To prevent farmers from facing further financial losses, integration of drone technology in locust forecasting and treatment is said to be a viable option.

The integration of technologies such as data science, agriscience, machine learning, IoT, data analytics, and AI in the agricultural ecosystem is deemed pivotal in minimizing risk.

Cropin is a leading agritech startup that has been helping farmers create more value for their crops — a vision aligned with the central government’s mission to empower farmers. The Bengaluru-based company launched ‘SmartFarm’ in 2012 which provides real-time actionable insights on standing crops.

In 2018, Cropin introduced SmartRisk™ that mobilized artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics to make predictive and prescriptive solutions possible. It has since deployed its technological solutions to 30 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Americas. With its full-stack solutions and a global foothold, Cropin has been extending support to 2.1 million farmers.

An Accenture report had estimated the digital agriculture services market to hit USD 4.55 billion by 2020, a figure that supported the claim that agritech startups have the propensity to grow manifold in the country. A much-needed intervention for an industry on the shoulders of which the entire economy rests.

A weak health sector is like a puny immune system — while the latter is detrimental for the human body, the former can wreak havoc on an entire economy.

In a country where the government’s health expenditure has remained at around 1 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the past decade, the 2020 global crisis came as an urgent reminder to India to invest considerably in the sector.

Meanwhile, Hyderabad-based Arvi has pledged to save lives using the power of AI and deep learning. Founded in 2019 by IIT-Bombay alumni Sushant Reddy, and Avinash Lavangal, Arvi has developed contactless kiosks that combine facial scanning along with thermal screening to speed up India’s fight against COVID-19. This technology can easily detect people with high temperatures as well as those violating requirements to wear masks.

The success of this technology will pave way for an interesting journey for Arvi, which started out in the healthcare sector with a simple idea -

a smart medical alert system for senior citizens to provide emergency and day-to-day medical assistance at the push of a button.

During the pandemic, it became critical to break the chain of transmission and prevent community transfer. With 464 people per square kilometre, pressing against each other, you look for an idea that works better than 6-feet social distancing norms. Arvi’s safe technology provides just that.

The kiosks can be easily installed by companies, restaurants, housing societies as well as manufacturing plants.