Prof. P Krishna Reddy gave an online talk on Crop Darpan: Exploiting Data Science to Empower a Farmer to Diagnose Farm Problems on 29 January as part of CS Seminar Series, Spring-2024 at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, USA

Here is the summary of the talk as explained by Prof.  P Krishna Reddy: Despite the variety of traditional and IT-based agricultural information delivery approaches, the majority of Indian farmers  are not acquiring or provided with  the actionable agricultural information in a timely and regular  manner. IT  based agricultural information delivery systems, which have been developed during the last two decades, can be categorized as pull-based, push-based, and hybrid systems. The pull-based systems assume that the farmers and other stakeholders pull the information. Call centres and several web portals come under this category. The experience shows that the majority of poor and marginal farmers are not covered by such systems as farmers are unable to pull the actionable agricultural information from such systems due to low knowledge levels, communication gap and perceptual problems. The push-based systems vary with respect to the degree of generalisation to personalization. The radio, video, proactive SMS- and voice-based services push generic information to farmers and so are ineffective.

To address the lab to land gap in agriculture, since 2004,   research efforts are being made 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, we have built eSagu system, village-level eSagu system. Moreover,  we are investigating the  building of  Crop Darpan system. The Crop Darpan App  is available for Cotton and Rice crops at Google Play Store  and Apple App Store. In this talk, I will share the experiences of building these systems and  share the future plans.

Crop Darpan Apps

Google Play store:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.iiit.cropdarpan

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/crop-darpan/id1556486922

January 2024