For years, Mangesh, a former engineer at Maharashtra’s renewable-energy agency, worked on a fairly modern Indian proposition: how to monetise drought. 

Droughts plague the state’s farming belts in Vidarbha and Marathwada, where the ground is cracked more often than green. Farmers now lease their parched fields, sometimes sell them to power companies, where rows of solar panels stand as precisely as crop lines once did. “The same sun that punished our farms is now powering our industries,” he said. 

No industry benefits more from this bargain than data........

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