Dr. Sachin Chaudhari’s students – Rahul Kumar, MS by Research in CSE and Ponnapureddy Srujan Reddy, MS by Research in ECE have been selected for the Chanakya PG Fellowship 2025.

For the 2025 fellowship cycle, the TIH team proposed a focused problem statement in the agriculture domain – Image-based Disease Detection Leveraging Machine Learning Approaches for Crops. The project focused on crops such as maize, sugarcane, wheat, rice, soybean, and others.

More than 2000 students from across India submitted proposals addressing this theme and only 10 teams were selected. The TIH committee evaluated these submissions based on the quality, originality, and relevance of the ideas, and shortlisted candidates for the next stage.

Shortlisted students were subsequently invited for interviews, where the panel assessed their understanding of the problem, technical competencies, and feasibility of their proposed methodologies. Following this rigorous selection process, both students received confirmation of their acceptance into the fellowship.

Their selection reflects the strong research culture at the institute and highlights the impactful work being carried out in emerging areas of technology for societal benefit.

This initiative is a collaboration between TIH Bombay, the Government of Maharashtra, the Department of Agriculture, and DST. The goal of the project is to develop a mobile application capable of detecting early-stage crop diseases. Farmers can simply capture and upload a photo of their crop on the app, and the computer vision model will identify the disease and provide suitable recommendations.

November 2025