Agri land price index launched by IIM-Ahmedabad and SFarmsIndia

In cooperation with agri-land marketplace SFarmsIndia, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) announced the introduction of the IIMA-SFarmsIndia Agri Land Price Index (ISALPI) on Thursday.

The index was created to collect and display ‘quality controlled’ data on agricultural land values across the country. The index will be hosted on the official website of the Misra Centre for Financial Markets and Economy at IIMA.

The index, according to IIM-A, will serve as a trustworthy source for evaluating land values in rural and semi-urban regions, as well as signaling possible agricultural land conversion into real estate.

Given the difficulty of creating a land parcel index due to evident price discrepancies in various listings generated by a variety of factors, including market-wide supply-demand considerations, the ISALPI index was created to overcome these differences and ensure accurateness.

The ISALPI index was created using regression-based hedonic pricing methodologies, according to the top business school.

Director of IIMA, Professor Errol D’Souza said, “With little over 200 million hectares, India homes just 2% of the world’s cropped land, but feeds over 15% of the world’s population.”

“We’ve recently seen a spike in entrepreneurial interest in agriculture and related fields, including anything from agricultural engineering to precision farming, food technology to supply chain management, and green energy. We feel the timing is perfect to create an index like this for India. We intend to create better data sources with ISALPI so that all stakeholders may make informed decisions at the national and regional levels and encourage agribusiness activity,” he added.

ISALPI currently uses land listing data from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh. The index might become more beneficial in two ways when more data from other Indian states becomes available.

It will, first and foremost, provide improved depiction of the national context. Second, at the regional level, it will provide a more detailed index.

“SFarmsIndia has a significant focus on data warehousing and mining targeted at offering cutting-edge agri-realty domain specific AI capabilities to the market,” said CEO of SFarmsIndia, Mr. Kamesh Mupparaju. The collaboration with IIMA to develop an Agri-land price index (ISALPI) is an important step in this regard.”