Zuari’s approach was not about deploying a tool and stepping back, instead, the company embedded its digital rollout into the social and behavioural fabric of villages says, Fawzia Tarannum, Advisor – Cane Excellence Program, Zuari Industries

Once the lifeblood of India’s rural economy, the sugarcane sector – employing over 50 million farmers and thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers – is now struggling under the weight of deep-rooted challenges. Despite its scale and significance in states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, the industry faces hurdles ranging from low sugar recovery rates and erratic production cycles to outdated technology and limited financial support.  Fawzia Tarannum, Advisor – Cane Excellence Program at Zuari Industries, believes one of the critical missing pieces is a climate-resilient insurance framework for farmers.

Climate Chaos, Wild Animals, and the Smallholder Struggle
Climate change has impacted every crops and the story is pretty much same for sugercane too. Gobind Sugar’s command area – located between the Ghagra and Sharda river basins – is increasingly vulnerable to unseasonal floods driven by climate change. “In the last five years alone, our area has seen floods thrice – caused not just by local rains but by upstream dam releases,” she said.

Tarannum added that, in 2023, floods wiped out 8,000 hectares of crop, even as the mill managed to surpass last year’s crushing volumes. Other recurring issues include heat stress, pest outbreaks, and rising stray animal damage, including from monkeys and wild boar. Smallholder farmers – comprising nearly 80 to 85 per cent of the cane supply – are hit hardest, especially due to limited access to mechanisation and climate-resilient inputs.

Sugarcane Insurance and Climate Preparedness
Tarannum believes the stressed sugarcane sector urgently needs the revival of crop insurance, tailored to planting variability and growing climate risks. “Just like we have schemes for rice or wheat, cane needs climate-responsive insurance coverage. The existing model was discontinued due to complexities in sowing timelines, but solutions are possible with today’s data tools,” she said. She also emphasised the need for flood modelling using geospatial data and stronger decision-support systems to help pre-empt future climate disasters.

Rewiring Rural Farming
In the heartlands of India’s sugar belt, where farming has traditionally been dependent on manual knowledge-sharing and legacy practices, Tarannum, claimed that a quiet revolution is underway. Highlighting the impact of the Zuari’s flagship Saksham App, she said Zuari is fostering a digital culture among small and marginal farmers, many of whom had never used a smartphone for farming needs before.

Zuari’s approach was not about deploying a tool and stepping back. Instead, the company embedded its digital rollout into the social and behavioural fabric of villages. Recognising that many smartphones in rural households are with younger family members, and literacy among elder farmers remains low, the company adopted a multi-pronged approach such as: village demonstrations and hands-on training, peer influence via WhatsApp groups of smart growers, incentive-driven adoption through point-based rewards, integration with familiar tools like IVRS in local dialects

“At first, farmers only used the app to check payment updates,” Tarannum recalled. “But slowly, as we showed them that clicking a picture of a diseased leaf could fetch a real solution – interest started to grow.”

Gender, Generations, And The Digital Gap
Interestingly, the digital shift also illustrated generational and gender divides. In many households, the younger generation – more comfortable with tech – became the bridge between Zuari’s app and the elder growers. “Sometimes a farmer’s son helps him upload field data. It becomes a shared activity, and in a way, it is enabling intergenerational learning,” claimed Tarannum.

Behind this soft-touch engagement Tarannum claimed that lies a massive technical undertaking. Zuari has digitised over 4.5 lakh land parcels within its 60,000-hectare command area. Using GPS and GIS tools, her team now verifies crop data without the need to physically measure each plot – a process that once took two months is now done in a fraction of the time, added Tarannum.

Drainage Loss, Silted Rivers, and Policy Gaps
Tarannum believes part of the problem is structural. “Our irrigation systems remain, but drainage infrastructure has vanished—either encroached upon or reclassified as forest land,” she explained. Riverbeds are silted to the brim, and low-capacity culverts fail during peak discharge. “Many distributaries have hume pipes and bridges that choke during heavy flows, forcing water into standing fields,” she said.

To tackle the issue, company mobilised farmers across districts like Lakhimpur, Sitapur, and Bahraich to submit petitions to the local administration, demanding bund repair and de-siltation. “We have seen positive action in some areas—bunds are being reinforced and desilting work has started. But we need policy support at scale,” Tarannum said.

Real-time App, Smart Board, Swift Response
Timely and active engagements is the need of hour to farmers. Catering the need, Tarannum told that smart monitoring system deployed by Gobind Sugar mill is integrated with a customer care line accessible to farmers, enabling instant issue resolution. Whether it is a delayed truck, mechanical loader downtime, or irregular crop flow, mill operators get immediate alerts via a digital smart board and can take corrective action in real-time.

“If a truck is supposed to be loaded in one hour and there’s a delay due to equipment issues, we intervene instantly,” Tarannum noted. This system helped the mill achieve one of the state’s highest recovery rates and 8 per cent more cane crushed this year compared to the last, despite climate-induced area loss, she claimed.