WOW STORY OF THE DAY She Asked Why Soil Tests Needed Labs. Fifteen Years Later, India’s Farms Carry Her Answer

Dr. Rajul Patkar, IIT Bombay PhD scientist and CEO of Proximal Soilsens Technologies, co-founded the company in June 2017 with five fellow researchers including Prof. V Ramgopal Rao. Her flagship invention NutriSens, the world's smallest portable soil testing device, tests six soil parameters in five minutes, has reached 10,000 to 15,000 farmers across seven Indian states, and is backed by 14 investors including Social Alpha, WRI India, and Cisco LaunchPad.

A PhD Vision Born in 2011, a Six-Person Founding Team, and Fifteen Years of Building

• Rajul Patkar began envisioning low-cost sensor devices for agriculture while pursuing her PhD at IIT Bombay in 2011. Her thesis focused on low-cost MEMS and NEMS based sensors for agriculture, a deeply technical foundation that gave her the scientific architecture to build what she imagined.
• After completing her doctorate, she joined hands with five fellow researchers to found Proximal Soilsens Technologies Private Limited on June 23, 2017, registered in Mulshi, Maharashtra. The founding team included Prof. Valipe Ramgopal Rao, a distinguished IIT Bombay professor, alongside Vinay Palaparthy, Jobish John, Mangesh Gurav, and Maryam Shojaei Baghini. The company was incubated at IIT Bombay with support from the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and a grant from the Millennium Alliance, a consortium including the Government of India and USAID.
• The founding mission was stated simply and powerfully: create wealth through sustainability. Affordable technology for Indian farmers. More crop per drop of water. Soil intelligence at the fingertips of every person who grows India's food.
• The first NutriSens prototype arrived in early 2022, more than a decade after the original vision. That patience, that insistence on getting the science right before scaling, is what made everything that followed possible.

The World's Smallest Soil Testing Device, and the Women Who Carry It Across India's Farms

• NutriSens is the world's smallest portable soil testing device, weighing just 50 grams and running entirely on mobile phone power. A farmer prepares a one-gram soil sample, mixes it with a three-millilitre agent solution in a small vial, shakes it, waits approximately 30 minutes for the soil to settle, and places a drop of the clear solution on a paper-based sensor strip. The device reads pH, electrical conductivity, nitrate, phosphate, potassium, and one additional major nutrient, all six parameters, in under five minutes. Results appear immediately on a companion mobile app alongside a downloadable soil health card with fertiliser recommendations.
• Tamil Nadu Agricultural University independently validated NutriSens, confirming 80 to 90 percent accuracy compared to full laboratory results. The device costs approximately ₹10,000 for marginal farmers and reduces the individual testing cost from ₹500 in private labs to just ₹300 in the field. With a three-year lifespan and the capacity to handle approximately 3,000 tests annually, NutriSens makes soil testing economically viable at the village level for the first time.
• The second product, TerraPort, is a compact 100-gram portable device equipped with multiple sensors that farmers carry through their fields, gathering real-time data and uploading it via mobile for immediate analysis. Both devices require just 30 minutes of training, making them accessible to farmers, students, and rural women alike.
• The most powerful distribution decision Soilsens made was to train rural women as soil health entrepreneurs. Rather than relying on conventional sales channels, Dr. Patkar's team empowered trained women to travel between farms, conduct tests, interpret results, and deliver recommendations directly to farmers. In regions like Solapur, this model has already produced measurable behaviour change: farmers who received immediate, actionable soil data began switching from urea to organic alternatives like cow dung, reducing chemical dependency and improving long-term soil health.

The Most Important Problems Are the Ones That Have Been Accepted as Unsolvable for Too Long

• The sharpest lesson from Proximal Soilsens's journey is this: the problems that entire industries treat as structurally impossible are often the ones that yield the greatest breakthroughs when a scientist with deep domain expertise and genuine farmer empathy decides to solve them.
• India's soil testing infrastructure has been inadequate for decades. Everyone in agriculture knew it. Almost no one attempted to fix it because the constraints, cost, accuracy, training, rural access, and scalability, seemed too complex to solve simultaneously.
• Dr. Rajul Patkar solved all of them. Not in a boardroom. In a laboratory at IIT Bombay, over fifteen years of PhD research, prototype building, pilot testing, and farmer handholding. And then she trained rural women to carry the solution across India's fields.
• "After realising this, my first and foremost challenge was to bring down the cost of the technology and design the product geared toward Indian farmers," she says.
• She asked why blood tests could be done at home but soil tests required a laboratory. Fifteen years later, the answer is travelling between farms in the hands of rural women entrepreneurs across seven Indian states. And India's soil is finally beginning to speak.

Sources: The Better India, Electronics For You, Tracxn, PitchBook, DST India, SPAN Magazine, TheCompanyCheck, LinkedIn