A ‘Matchmaker’ Platform Boosts Farm Worker Incomes From Rs 6K to Rs 20K per Month in Nashik

The morning sun has barely risen over a vineyard in Nashik’s grape belt, but work has already begun.

Standing between neatly pruned vines, farmer Bapusaheb Salunkhe checks his phone — not for messages, but for labour. A few taps on WhatsApp, and a team is already assigned for the day. No frantic calls, no early-morning trips to a labour chowk, and no last-minute uncertainty.

“They come on time now,” he says simply. “Earlier it was hard to find labour, but after using this platform, my problem is solved.”

This shift from uncertainty to predictability is at the heart of what Bharat Intelligence is trying to build.

As co-founder Azaan Merchant puts it, “There was one problem which farmers kept talking about, the labour issue. It was just accepted as a problem, and no one challenged it.”

So they decided to.

Why India’s farm labour problem needed fixing

India has over 144.3 million agricultural labourers, one of the largest workforces in the world. And yet, for something so massive, the system runs on guesswork.

There’s little reliable data on who these workers are, where they move, what skills they have, or when they’re available. Farmers, meanwhile, operate under constant pressure, especially in horticulture, where timing can make or break an entire harvest.

Traditionally, hiring happens in three ways:

• Calling neighbours or nearby villages

• Visiting a labour chowk at dawn and negotiating on the spot

• Relying on middlemen (mukadams), often involving advances and uncertainty

The result? Mistrust on both sides. Farmers don’t know if workers will show up or if they’re skilled. Labourers don’t know if they’ll get paid or even get work the next day.

And because farm operations are time-sensitive, even a delay of a day or two can risk an entire crop cycle.

At the same time, the irony is stark: there is no shortage of labour in India, only a lack of coordination.

“We realised the problem wasn’t the absence of people,” says Gaurav Sanghai, co-founder of Bharat Intelligence. “It was visibility, liquidity, and coordination. So we decided to solve it as a matchmaking problem.”

The people who decided to solve it

For Azaan Merchant, the journey into rural India wasn’t planned.

“I spent almost 10 years working abroad, investing in enterprise technology companies across the UK and California,” he says. 

Over time, he grew a venture capital fund from $50 million to $400 million, working closely with companies that would go on to be valued at over Rs 10,000 crore.

But his turning point came after returning to India.

“I was asked to join the board of an NGO in the agri space; that was kind of my entry into understanding rural India,” he says.

What followed was a year and a half of travelling across Maharashtra, living with farmers, and studying horticulture value chains up close.

“The more time I spent out there, I realised that there was a lot of potential to impact the lives of millions of people in a relatively straightforward manner,” he says. 

Two years ago, he decided to quit his high-paying job at an AI company and become an agripreneur. 

Gaurav, his co-founder, brought the technical depth to that vision.

With a background in engineering and a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence from IIT, his focus has been clear: 

“Taking the cutting-edge technology into the part of the pyramid where people need it the most.”

The two met at a venture incubator, where founders were brought together to find co-founders.

“Out of all the people out there, Gaurav had the perfect technical complementary skill set,” Azaan says. “And most importantly, he had a nation-first mentality.”

Together, they set out to build not just a product, but a system that could fundamentally organise India’s labour ecosystem.

Building Bharat’s ‘Labour OS’

That idea became Bharat Intelligence, an AI-powered platform designed to organise India’s fragmented agricultural labour market. It was registered in 2024, with official operations beginning in 2025.

At its core, the company is building what it calls a Labour OS — a system that maps, understands, and connects both sides of the rural workforce.

The approach is deliberately simple on the surface.

There’s no app to download. Farmers and workers interact through WhatsApp or voice calls — tools they already use and trust.

Behind the scenes, however, the system is quite simple and easy to use. The platform processes close to 100 data points per farmer — including crop type, acreage, pruning or plantation dates, and regional patterns — to predict exactly when labour will be needed.

For instance, in grape farming, once a pruning date is known, the entire sequence of activities over the next 130 days can be mapped out.

On the supply side, Bharat Intelligence has created what it calls a ‘Digital Village’ model.

Across thousands of villages, it maps labour pools using:

• Village-level data and migration patterns

• Local influencers like sarpanches and CSC operators

• Worker skill sets, availability, and reliability

• Socio-economic and cultural signals

This is combined into a proprietary “Rural Intelligence Knowledge Graph” — essentially a living map of India’s labour ecosystem.

“We want to become the operating system for labour,” Gaurav explains. “A place where we understand who is where, what they do, and how to connect them efficiently.”

How it works on the ground

For farmers, the experience is straightforward.

Instead of scrambling for labour every few days, they can book an entire season in advance.

If a farmer has three acres of grapes, Bharat Intelligence takes responsibility for ensuring that the right number of workers with the right skills show up at the right time, across multiple stages of the crop cycle.

The farmer pays per acre (around Rs 25,000), and the rest – logistics, coordination, quality is handled by the platform.

For labourers, the shift is even more significant. Earlier, workers like 28-year-old Janardhan Bhoye spent years navigating uncertainty.

“Sometimes we were promised work for five acres, but after reaching there, it would become two-and-a-half,” he recalls. “Payment would get delayed, sometimes for days.”

Now, things are different.

“We don’t have to look for work anymore,” he says. “The company helps us find it.”

On the platform, labour teams are guaranteed work across the season, often up to 300 days a year. Instead of daily wage uncertainty, they are paid based on output, allowing them to earn more if they work more efficiently.

Daily earnings range between Rs 800 and Rs 1,000 — but the real shift is in consistency.

People who earlier earned Rs 6,000 – Rs 7,000 a month are now making closer to Rs 20,000.

And there’s another change: dignity. Workers no longer have to wait at labour chowks or settle for low, negotiated wages. Instead, they earn fair pay and recognition for their skills.

“It is far better than before,” Janardhan says. “It’s time-effective, and overall, it benefits us.”

From chaos to predictability

The impact of this structured system is already visible in pilot regions like Nashik. So far, the platform has completed over 5,000 acres of vineyard operations, with 3,000 workers deployed and another 2,000 in the pipeline. 

The platform has achieved an impressive 86% repeat farmer rate, and within just 10 days of launch, it generated a job pipeline worth over Rs 2 crore, and all of this, notably, without any marketing spend.

For farmers, the biggest relief is mental. “They just want labour to show up on time, nothing more,” Azhaan adds.

Once that happens consistently, trust follows. Farmers begin to increase the cultivation of high-value crops. Yields improve because operations happen on schedule. Income potential rises, sometimes by 30–40%.

For workers, the benefits go beyond just income. The platform is also working toward providing skill certification and formal recognition, creating digital work identities, and improving access to social security and insurance. 

Over time, it is also helping bring more stability to migration patterns, making work more predictable and secure.

About 50% of the workforce on the platform are women, many working as part of husband-wife teams, effectively doubling household income.

“In some cases, families are going from Rs 50,000 a year to Rs 3–4 lakh,” Azaan notes. “That’s a massive shift.”

The road ahead

Despite the early traction, the founders are clear-eyed about the challenge ahead. This isn’t a logistics problem involving packages — it’s one involving people.

Ensuring thousands of workers show up at the right farms, every day, with the right skills and mindset, is operationally complex.

But the scale of opportunity is just as large.

Even within Nashik’s grape sector alone, there are an estimated 6 lakh workers. And beyond grapes lie crops like bananas, cotton, sugarcane, and coffee – each with its own labour ecosystems.

The plan is to build a playbook in one region, then expand across crops and geographies.

In the next five years, Bharat Intelligence aims to organise and deploy 10 lakh rural workers — creating the infrastructure that makes dignified, reliable agricultural employment possible at scale.

A system that finally works

Back in the vineyard, the workday is in full swing. Teams move in rhythm, pruning vines with practised precision. There’s no confusion about who is doing what or whether the work will get done.

For farmers like Bapusaheb, that certainty is everything. What was once a daily struggle has now become predictable and seamless. “The platform is very convenient on WhatsApp,” he says. “Things get done faster and always on time.”

For workers like Janardhan, it’s the difference between searching for work and having it assured. “If it continues like this, this would mean a steady flow of work, reliable income, and one less uncertainty to worry about each day,” he adds.

And that may be the most important part of this story. Because in a system that once ran on uncertainty, even predictability feels like progress.

And in that steady shift, from labour chowks to a labour OS, lies the possibility of something much larger:

An agricultural economy that works not just efficiently but fairly for everyone involved.

All images courtesy Bharat Intelligence team

Source: 

Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare by PIB Delhi: Published on 4 February 2020

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com