Artificial Intelligence in Indian Agriculture – An Industry and Startup Overview

Agriculture plays a vital role in India’s economy. Over 58 percent of the rural households depend on
agriculture as their principal means of livelihood, according to an IBEF report.

the government of India is introducing a new AGRI-UDAAN programme to mentor startups and enable
them to connect with potential investors.

the most popular applications of AI in Indian agriculture appear to fall into three major categories:

Crop and Soil Monitoring – Companies are leveraging sensors and various IoT-based technologies to
monitor crop and soil health.

Predictive Agricultural Analytics – Various AI and machine learning tools are being used to predict the
optimal time to sow seeds, get alerts on risks from pest attacks, and more.

Supply Chain Efficiencies– Companies are using real-time data analytics on data-streams coming from
multiple sources to build an efficient and smart supply chain.

Artificial intelligence could identify trouble, such as fungus growth and water shortages, in corn and
soyabean crops weeks before the naked eye would ever realize it.

AI helps to predict the likelihood of rain, the outbreak of diseases or attack of pests and the soil health
condition.

Meanwhile, Tech Mahindra has developed Farm Guru, a solar-powered portable unit, to assist farmers
from the time of sowing, through the cropping season and then to post-harvest phase. Likely to be
priced in the range of Rs.30,000, the mobile unit gets inputs from sensors and send them to the back-
office for processing and get back to farmers with advisories.

CropIn’s ‘smartfarm’ solution,

CropIn is a Bengaluru-based startup which claims to be an intuitive, intelligent, and self-evolving system
that delivers future-ready farming solutions to the agricultural sector.

plots were geo-tagged monitoring crop health and harvest estimation, and alerts on pest, diseases etc.

Intello Labs – Using Deep Learning for Image Analysis

The first and foremost block is the requirement of large amounts of data
non-availability of data from remote areas, and farmlands that don’t meet
minimum hectre criteria during surveys, are often left out.
Indian farmers use AI India is an agrarian economy and over 58 percent of the rural households depend
on agriculture as their principal means of livelihood.

Every year since 2013, more than 12,000 suicides have been reported in the agricultural sector with 10
percent accounting for farmer suicides. Collectively, seven states (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana,
Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Naidu) accounted for 87.5 percent of the
total suicides in the farming sector. Additionally, the reasons for farmers’ suicides have varied widely
including high input costs, low yields, disintegration with markets, mounting loans, water crisis and
urban consumer-driven economic policies.

oldest industry on our planet, agriculture

interestingly, Indian farmers are not oblivious to digital farming. In the past, Tata Consultancy Services
(TCS) Innovation Labs introduced mKrishi, which allowed farmers to receive advice on pest information,

Sowing the Seeds High-tech agriculture starts at the very second that the seed
is first placed in the ground
Pest and Weed Control

Yesterday's farmers were living in fear of the windstorm and the grasshopper – not anymore. Farmers
are quickly adopting new high-tech ways of protecting plants against weeds and various kinds of pests
outdoors.

Eye in the Sky

How are farms using artificial intelligence to direct crop planting, harvesting and more, These airborne
surveillance engines can look for stunted crops, signs of pest or weed damage, dryness and many other
variables that are part of the difficulty

Who's Picking Your Food? robotic harvesting equipment, partially in response to labor gaps that
have left farmers scrambling to harvest crops like fruits and berries.

Why the killer DDT, could not survive

Different sort of pest management
practices are used by farmers to
protect the crop from the invasion
of the pests. Insecticides are highly
popular because it gives relatively
quick results to enhance the
production both in quantative and
qualitative terms, ultimately
increasng their income. DDT
(Dichloro Diphenyl trichloroethane)
is a synthetic chemical discovered
by Othmer Ziedler in 1874 but its
insecticidal property was
discovered after a gap of 65 years by Paul Muller of Switzerland in 1939. This
discovery was like a miracle and gave revolutionary control over insects and
pests. It was effective to control diseases of human and other mammals which
were transmitted by insect vector by managing the insect vector.
World War II was first US war in which diseases transmitted by insect vector
like malaria (vector Anopheles spp.), typhus (vector fleas) resulted less
human loss than bomb and bullet due to DDT. It also became popular among
the farmers because it killed the most of insect and pests except some beetle
(coleoptera), grasshopper (orthoptera) and aphid (hemiptera) of crop and
generally did not show phytotoxic effect to most of the crops except tomato,
cucurbit etc. In 1948 Paul Muller awarded by Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine for his discovery of wonderful chemical properties of DDT. It is an
organochlorine group insecticide which has potent non systemic, stomach and
contact action.

DDT persists for long time in the plant, soil and also accumulates in fat bodies
of birds, fishes and mammals and is also secreted in milk. It also causes
cancer, male infertility etc. The effect of DDT was too dangerous however
probably in 1946 two scientist Elmer Higgins and Calarence Coltam published
an article about tendency of DDT to accumulate in the fatty tissue of animals
which caused health hazard. But since the time of World War II DDT hailed as
“saviour of mankind” and “alternative and better choice than pyrethrum” to
control mosquito so the widespread use of DDT was continued and no
positive response was received by this article.
An American ecologist who was also known as “a bird lover – a cat lover- a
fish lover- a priestess of nature”, Rachel Carson described the effect of DDT
upon wildlife in her book “Silent Spring” in 1962. She wrote about how the
reckless use of pesticide was contaminating the natural environment and
slowly poisoning living thing. She described that only exposure of DDT
reduces the reproductive potential of birds and if it ingested by bird laid thin
shell egg which rarely survives.
Hungary became the first country that banned the application of DDT in
agriculture followed by Norway and Sweden. On 14th June 1972, EPA
(Environmental Protection Agency) announced that application of DDT in
agriculture would be illegal from 31st December, 1972 in US. By 1991 at least
26 countries announced complete ban on DDT, which meant it would not be
manufactured, imported, exported or used for any purpose. In India DDT was
used extensively and legally in agriculture till 1989 while other countries
phased it out from agriculture. It is unfortunate that India produces nearly
6000 tonnes of DDT annually for medical purposes to eradicate mosquito,
even when mosquitoes developed resistance against DDT. Also, State
governments run mosquito eradication programme by spraying DDT once or
two times in a year. The DDT ingested by aquatic organism like small
planktons (floating organism) when consumed by fish, gets accumulated in
the body of fish and from these fish to large fish, bird and human. As the tropic
level increases in a food chain, the amount of toxic (DDT) also increases this
phenomenon called as biomagnifications. But it is good news for all Indian
that the story of persistence and highly biomagnified insecticide DDT which
causes health and environmental hazard will be describe on the page of
history only since the year 2020 according to an agreement of India with US in
2015.