Seeing Her Father’s Onions Go to Waste, This Engineer Built Tech Helping Farmers Save 25% of Harvest

Every time her father’s onions rotted in storage, she felt the loss twice — as a daughter and as an engineer. Today, Kalyani Shinde’s Godaam Sense prevents 25% of India's onions from spoiling, helping farmers save tonnes of harvest.

Did you know India grows millions of tonnes of onions, yet nearly 40% never reach our plates? Prices swing, livelihoods crumble, and food chains buckle. The culprit? Invisible spoilage in storage.

Kalyani grew up in Lasalgaon, Nashik, home to Asia’s largest onion market. She saw the crisis firsthand and didn’t wait to graduate. In 2018, she joined Digital Impact Square (TCS Foundation) and turned her family's pain into action.

Three months of fieldwork — talking to farmers, warehouse staff, and merchants — revealed the real problem: storage, not production. Traditional warehouses couldn’t track conditions, letting onions rot silently.

Her solution? Godaam Sense. An IoT device that monitors temperature, humidity, and spoilage gases in real time. Farmers receive alerts the moment 1% of stock starts deteriorating.

Each device can protect 10 metric tons of onions. Placed across warehouses, it gives farmers real-time dashboards, bi-weekly alerts, and the power to regrade or sell produce before it spoils.

The result: Farmers reduce wastage by 20–25%, saving crops that would have rotted. Now used in hundreds of warehouses, Godaam Sense has attracted support from ICAR-DOGR, Tata Trust, and BIRAC.

Kalyani is now collaborating with Tata Steel to build India’s first smart onion warehouses — Agronest. And this is only the beginning. Imagine the impact when scores of young innovators follow her path!