A milk startup takes on 300 million cows

India's sprawling agriculture industry has the world's largest dairy herd. One startup aims to modernise it

When Srikumar Misra moved back home to this eastern Indian city from London in 2010 to launch a milk company, it was about as far from Silicon Valley as an ambitious entrepreneur could get.

Armed with social media, smartphone apps and big-data analytics, Mr. Misra's dairy business is among hundreds of startup companies leveraging the arrival of the internet in rural areas in India.

Technology is taking on one of India's biggest economic challenges: modernizing the country's massive informal economy. Tech is especially being put to the test by a tangle of millions of independent laborers, farmers and tiny companies