All-weather man: How Jatin Singh built Skymet into a rival to IMD

Singh tells that much of his career has been about building systems the government should have

On a warm, poor air quality April afternoon, with nary a cloud in the sky, we are meeting Jatin Singh to talk about the rain. It is one of those conversations that we know will begin with the weather and stay on it. After all, nothing interests Singh like the weather.

 

A pioneer in private sector weather forecasting in India, he is the founder of Skymet, which has, over the last two decades, emerged as the only credible alternative to the government-run India Meteorological Department (IMD). So it comes as no surprise when he picks Chidambaram’s New Madras Hotel, an eatery close to Mausam Bhawan, the IMD headquarters in south Delhi, for our lunch meeting even though his office is in Noida, a good 20-plus km away. In the early years of Skymet, Singh would hold practically every press conference in this area. The venue would be India Habitat Centre, a multi-purpose convention centre that’s right opposite IMD’s dominating building.

 

In this David versus Goliath challenge, the choice of the humble, no-frills Chidambaram’s seems symbolic, though Singh says he has chosen it because “I love hole-in-the-wall kind of places that serve authentic recipes”. The south Indian eatery is located in Khanna Market, which gets its name from Mehr Chand Khanna, the Union minister of rehabilitation who set it up for Partition refugees in 1954. The Chidambaram who started the restaurant used to be a cook in the 1930s in British-ruled India.

 

It’s the second time we have landed at Chidambaram’s in two days. The last time, Singh had forgotten all about our scheduled meeting and had instead gone off to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh for work. We realised he wasn’t turning up when we were halfway through the rasam they serve as an appetiser as soon as you sit at a table. Today, he has arrived early, and we find him waiting outside on a chair, next to the staff, unbothered by the heat. He apologises profusely for the other day as we head into the air-conditioned part of the place, which is smaller but quieter. Promptly, three glasses of rasam appear on our table. 

 

Over the hot, tangy, soupy dish, we ask him the most obvious question: What blew him towards weather?

 

The Boston graduate begins at the beginning: “My father has been in this very niche business since 1989, supplying weather equipment and software to the IMD. He was of the view that maybe there was space for a private weather business.”

 

Singh, who started out as a TV journalist, says weather was never presented in an interesting form. So he made a weather animation and approached Sahara Samay. “As luck would have it, I bagged a juicy contract for ₹18 lakh to supply weather information.” He quit his job, “coincidentally got married at the same time”, and never looked back.

 

This was in 2003, when private news networks were breaking out of the half-hour slot on Doordarshan to launch 24x7 news. This was a period of the ‘India Shining’ economic boom. Singh was soon working with all kinds of TV networks, big and small, producing weather graphics and presenting forecasts. The business gradually grew.

 

The attentive server is back at our table. For starters we order a vada platter, which has an onion veg vada, a regular dal vada and a dahi vada. Service is quick, and we are soon devouring the sweet, melt-in-the-mouth dahi vada, and the crunchy, fluffy, tad too oily savoury vadas. The accompanying fig milkshakes and cold coffee go well with the snacks. We order the main course as well: Malabar parottas with kurma.

 

Taking a sip of the refreshing milkshake, Singh says, “At some point, I began thinking: Beyond news, what are the real applications of weather forecasting?” That’s when he realised how critical it was for the energy sector. 

 

After the Electricity Act of 2003, power trading and exchanges had begun to open up. “I started pitching to power distribution companies — NDPL (North Delhi Power Ltd), Torrent in Surat, and one in Bombay (now Mumbai).” They began buying forecasts from him “because they needed reliable data for day-ahead trading”.

 

Eventually, he branched into forecasting for wind and solar energy, and business grew to Rs 1-2 crore annually. “Honestly, I didn’t have bigger ambitions then,” says Singh, 48. “But with entrepreneurship, you realise that nothing stays the same. Clients come and go. Margins shrink.”

 

In 2007–08, he got involved with Nokia Life Tools, which aimed to provide short-term weather forecasts to farmers. “That, I would say, is when Skymet found its soul. The moment we entered agriculture, we entered a space where our work genuinely mattered to millions — where there was real need and no real solution, besides the IMD.”

 

Working with Reuters Market Light took him deeper into the ecosystem: Monsoon onset, village-level forecasting, farmer advisories. He began modelling forecasts and working with people from the Air Force. Skymet became a functioning, cash-flow-positive business.

 

Then came stagnation. “I started entering contests just to stay inspired,” he says. In 2009, he participated in a contest by The Economist on 10 game-changing ideas to tackle climate change. “We proposed a solution for monsoon forecasting, which I truly believe changed the game in India,” he says. “We were among the first to forecast the 2009 monsoon deficiency.’’ 

 

This put Skymet on the radar, and money came in. Food and agritech venture capital (VC) firm Omnivore invested ₹4.5 crore, giving the fledgling weather startup the resources it needed to hire more people, build better research and development capabilities, and install weather sensors. 

 

Singh, who sees himself as someone who is keeping the IMD on its toes, continues: “Around 2015, droughts were recurring; 249 districts were hit.” It was clear that weather variability was rising. “IMD, meanwhile, had quietly lowered the baseline for ‘normal’ rainfall from 889 mm to 868 mm — a big change,” he says. “This redefined what we considered ‘normal’, and complicated the picture for agriculture and policy planning.” The IMD, he says, also removed ‘drought’ from the definition altogether. “I still stick to it.”

 

IMD argued that meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural droughts shouldn’t be conflated. “But I still think the older classification gave us clearer correlations to food production, power demand, floods, and disaster patterns. When you remove those definitions, you blind policymakers. The change, I believe, was myopic.”

 

Meanwhile, business again ran into sustainability issues. This time, a key team member, Yogesh Patil, who’s now Skymet’s CEO, pointed him towards weather-based crop insurance. It required deploying weather stations at village or district level. Each station cost over ₹1 lakh, “and we needed thousands”. So he took loans, deployed the infrastructure, and became part of the ecosystem.

 

At its peak, Skymet had 7,000 automatic weather stations across India. Now it has 5,000.

 

“We also set up a lightning sensor network — lightning is India’s biggest natural killer,” he says. IMD had sensors but didn’t share the data, he adds. “We made ours public. We also created India’s first private mesonet in Mumbai for flood forecasting.”

 

Later, he expanded into agri-productivity and agri-advisory. “We were using drones to assess agriculture insurance claims as early as 2014, much before it became mandatory,” he adds.

 

All this led to the creation of WINDS — Weather Information Network and Data Systems. “We won tenders in UP, Odisha, and Assam,” he says. “In UP alone, we’re installing over 20,000 stations — a ₹100 crore plus investment, funded through both equity and debt.”

 

Skymet data today supports agriculture finance, disaster management, and crop insurance, and it has worked with the State Bank of India, ICICI, HDFC, helping digitise land records and generate farmer credit scores. 

 

“Much of my career has been about building systems the government should have,” Singh says. “But in a way, I filled the gaps.”

 

He also started a company called Gramcover, focused on rural insurance — crop, cattle, automobile, even life insurance. “At our peak, over a five-year period, we did about ₹1,000 crore in premiums. In FY23, we closed at about ₹350 crore,” he says. The business is still running, but Singh has stepped back. “One entrepreneur can’t run two high-intensity businesses at the same time,” he says.

 

We pause to order dessert: Kesari bath and strawberry ice-cream, which, when it arrives, is a little too pink. We ignore the suspicious colour and dig in.

 

Singh is now working on a project with telecom companies to use natural disruptions in signal strength as proxy data. “These interruptions in telecom signals can give you valuable information about rain and storm activity, and we’re figuring out how to use that to our advantage,” he says. The goal is radical: To build instantaneous weather awareness for every square centimetre of India without putting a single weather station or radar tower in the ground. 

 

The real threat today is extremes, he says. “Last year was the hottest summer in recorded history. That’s not just a heatwave — it’s a health emergency.” And the scary part is: “Our summer temperature forecasts still aren’t that accurate.” Seasonal precipitation forecasts work better, but temperature extremes are harder to model, he adds. 

 

For Singh, a humongous amount of work remains to be done. So when you ask him what leisure looks like to him, he quotes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working. And when I’m working, I’m working.”