In the semi-arid farmlands east of Mumbai is a small ethanol plant that, in a modest way, represents a global first.

Controlled by the local farmers in the Baramati district, the factory, Harneshwar Agro Products Power & Yeast (India), or “Happy India”, uses a large rock-like vegetable known as tropical sugar beet for its feedstock.

Developed more than a decade by Swiss-based Syngenta, the world’s largest agrochemicals groups, the crop – which is only now entering commercial production for the first time at this plant – produces as much sugar as conventional sugar cane in half the time with one third of the water.

“It frees up more land for food production without reducing sugar output,” says global head of biofuels development at Syngenta International, Dilip Gokhale.

The initiative is part of a push by global agribusiness groups such as Syngenta and US-based Monsanto to position themselves in the Indian agriculture market, potentially one of the world’s largest.

Syngenta’s Indian unit reported sales of Rs8.9bn ($214m) last year, up about 9 per cent on a year earlier and comprising nearly 20 per cent of its total sales for the Asia-Pacific region of $1.1bn.

With 65 per cent of India’s 1.1bn people living in rural areas, agriculture is one of the country’s most important sectors. But it is only growing at a rate of about 2 per cent a year because of chronically outdated methods and an inefficient supply chain. “Turning agriculture into an organised business – with the farmer as the entrepreneur – should be the key to the second green revolution,” Surabhi Mittal, of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, wrote in a paper.

Mr Gokhale first saw the potential of sugar beets in 1995 in Europe, where they are grown for only six months of the year. The conventional wisdom was that sugar beets were for temperate climates and sugar cane was for the tropics.

When he suggested introducing it to India, he remembers being told: “Don’t waste your time, this has been tried many times before and it doesn’t work.”

Mr Gokhale selected 10 varieties and painstakingly tested them over 10 years in Baramati, elsewhere in India and around the world, eventually developing a strain resistant to very hot and dry conditions.

BS Charaware, a farmer in the Baramati area and the chairman of Happy India, worked with Syngenta to persuade 12,300 local farmers to fund the ethanol project in exchange for shares and a place to process their new beet crops.

Mr Charaware says the advantage of the tropical beet was that in six months it produced the same amount of sugar, or sucrose, as sugar cane. It could then be harvested and rotated with another crop, providing cash for farmers without sacrificing food production.

Sugar cane, by contrast, is a thirsty, less productive crop that typically monopolizes a piece of land for years at a time.

Large-scale adoption of the new beets will take time. The crop requires more work – it must be harvested every six months and needs more management for pests and other factors. Still, the beets are slowly catching on with more adventurous farmers. As more of them successfully cultivate the crop, Mr Gokhale hopes others will follow. “Seeing is believing,” he says.