Prof. P Krishna Reddy gave a distinguished lecture on Crop Darpan: Towards building a smartphone-based system for improving the efficiency of every farm in India at SRM University – Andhra Pradesh, Department of Computer and Science and Engineering on 8 September.

Despite the variety of traditional and IT-based agricultural information delivery approaches, the majority of Indian farmers are not acquiring or provided actionable agricultural information in a timely and regular manner. Prof P Krishna Reddy addressed the issue of the lab to land gap in agriculture. He also talked about the eSagu system, an IT-based farm-specific agro-advisory system field-tested on about 50 field and horticultural crops in hundreds of villages.

Since 2004, research efforts have been ongoing at IIIT Hyderabad to investigate the building of IT-based agro-advisory systems to deliver actionable agro-advice to every farm field of India in a timely manner. In this connection, they have built the eSagu system and village-level eSagu system. Prof. Reddy and his team are currently investigating to build a Crop Darpan system. The Crop Darpan App is available for cotton and rice crops at Google Play Store and Apple App Store. In his talk, Prof P Krishna Reddy  shared the experiences of building these systems and the future plans.