The globalisation of agrochemical industry has a huge impact on the Indian market. Multinational agrochemical players will set up as well as expand the GICs (global in-house centres) in India.

With the high rate of population growth, increasing the need for food production and economic growth, the market for agrochemicals gets pushed ahead. 

Agrochemicals in India is largely an organic market, that has evolved as one of the largest contributors to the Indian economy and the consumer segment. 

“Closer home, erratic monsoon, uneven rainfall distribution and its prolonged withdrawal in certain locations, along with rural distress, are some of the key risks to the sector, thus at times leading to stagnation,” said Munira Loliwala, business head, EMPI, Teamlease Services.

“In the last two years, the sector has not seen promising milestones. The major gap is due to its a decline in the discovery of new active ingredients. Yet, there has been a substantial increase in the number of mixture products that entered the market,” she added. 

Loliwala said, “Moving out of its old-school thoughts, the industry seems to reskill, rebuild and reinvent its futuristic plans and growth.” 

“More informed farming techniques, impactful educative initiatives and direct market entrants are leading to newer possibilities of growth, thus attracting new-age talent to create impact,” he added. 

“Hiring from domains like technology, e-commerce, farming growth initiatives and digital space is the new era and need,” Loliwala said.

India’s agro industry is highly skewed with a few large global players and handful of Indian majors. The growth initiative companies in both spaces are looking to make investments to hire talent. 

Most companies are specific to hiring from start-ups, digital and technology platforms that enable digital tools and precision agriculture techniques.

The key reason as to why the global players prefer India to set up the GICs is the access to multi-faceted talent, low costs, inclined towards digitisation and a large pool of young professionals.

This encourages global companies to seek Indian working-age professionals with high linguistic abilities, yet lower wages. 

Companies across not only are hiring professionals in India to set-up GICs, but also investing in these professionals to comply with expectations on language, travel and flexi-work hours.

“Global players rely on Indian talent to support platforms for many international destinations, leveraging costs and skill sets,” Loliwala told F&B News.

“The number of candidates hired are as low as 50 and as high as 500 are being targeted that support in functions like IT, HR, finance and legal/patents,” she added.

“Locations such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai are prominent to host such set-ups. Hiring is trending for functions such as developing software tools and platforms that offer farmers unique techniques and monitoring their crop protection methods online and continuous,” Loliwala said.

With the majority of the sector being skewed with large players, companies are looking to bring in huge investments to India that will further strengthen the increase in demand of consumer foods and products. 

Leading agro giants are aggressively looking to hire well before the harvesting season this year as well.

“Though we see talent availability, the impact is low due to its limited resources and education graph not encouraging sufficient courses in farming, attracting candidates from services, e-commerce and sectors that drive speed and impactful technology is a huge disruption,” Loliwala said. 

“It is also a task to match the remuneration of such applicants, thus leaving the market to be driven by applicants, and thus creating an imbalance of demand versus supply,” she added.