Business conglomerate ITC is set to announce the launch of ‘ITC MAARS’ app, which seeks to offer a wide range of agricultural solutions to farmers, while creating new revenue streams and providing better markets for advanced agriculture and rural services.

The company mentioned that the app is set to benefit around 10 million farmers across multiple crop clusters.

The company is also partnering with farmers to develop robust models for value-added segments, such as better quality and organic chillies, mango pulp traceable to farms, specialty coffee certified for fair trade, wheat flours, and medicinal and aromatic plant extracts.

“ITC MAARS is a transformative business model, a very creative monetization model which will be built on the strength of e-Choupal 4.0. The physical aspects, whether it’s the demonstration farms, the lead farmers and the information highway connecting all the players come from the e-Choupal. ITC MAARS will provide better markets for advanced agriculture and rural services,” Sanjiv Puri said during an investor meeting.

Puri added, “There are about 1,000 or more agri-tech startups in India. MAARS will plug and play with agri-tech start-ups, create a hyper-local personalized solution at the farmer level."

The shares of ITC recently hit a 52-week high of Rs 273.15. Experts have pegged this rise to the opening up of the economy, which encouraged recovery of the hospitality and education sectors as well as opportunities in exports.

The key focus of the company has also been on FMCG, direct-to-consumer and digitalisation sectors since the onset of the pandemic.