IIM A launches India’s first Agri Land Price Index in collaboration with SFarmsIndia

June 02, 2022: The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), in collaboration with India’s first agri-land marketplace SFarmsIndia has announced the launch of IIMA-SFarmsIndia Agri Land Price Index (ISALPI), a first-of-its-kind land price index that will record and present ‘quality controlled’ data of prices of agricultural land across the country. According to a press release, this index is particularly important in terms of benchmarking land prices in rural and semi-urban areas. In such a case, the index will serve as a reliable source that will signal potential conversion of agricultural land into real estate. 

The method adopted for the preparation of ISALPI addresses these disparities and ensures accuracy. ISALPI has been put together using the regression-based hedonic pricing methods.

The Misra Centre for Financial Markets and Economy at IIMA, under which this index is being launched, will be hosting this index on its official website. 

Speaking of the relevance of the index in the current scenario, Professor Errol D’Souza, Director IIMA said: “With just over 200 million hectares, India houses just 2% of the world’s cropped land; but feeds over 15% of the world’s population. Recently, we have witnessed a surge in entrepreneurial interest in Agri land and allied professions: From agricultural engineering to precision farming, from food technology to supply chain management and green energy. We believe it is the right time to launch such an index for India. With ISALPI, we hope to build better data sources for all stakeholders to be able to take informed decisions at national as well as regional levels and support the agribusiness activities.”

Further elaborating on the utility of the index, project lead and associate professor of Real Estate Finance at IIMA, Dr Prashant Das, said, “Investors could use this information to assess the historical risk and return in the past and predict these metrics for the future to decide on their investment positions. Fund managers and producers could use this information to broadly benchmark their own performance. Financiers and insurers could use this information to assess the risk in the company related to the asset class reflected in the index. Researchers could use this information to study how economic events and factors are associated with price movements in a specific asset class. Policy makers (e.g. the Central bank) may use it to modulate their policies.”

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