It’s true! The latest agricultural input is the World Wide Web

NEW DELHI: When this year’s rabi or winter crops in Haryana’s Kurukshetra ripen, drones will circle them in a series of simultaneous experiments in three other states — Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. India’s vast and antiquated agriculture sector has largely been a stranger to such high-tech, although it feeds a billion people.

Yet, slowly, the country has realised that without technol- ogy, its farmers aren’t going anywhere beyond eking out a tough living. Frequent weather shocks push them back into poverty. Food-price spirals annoy consumers and hobble policymakers.

From traditional handholding measures, such as subsidies, farm solutions are now moving to the Internet, a vast rural mobile-phone subscriber base and spacetelecom technologies.

The drones, for instance, will scan two select districts in each of these four states. They will carry out special imaging with the help of one among a constellation of homegrown satellites. The images will be transmitted back to scientists at the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre in the Capital’s Pusa campus, a state-run farm science hub set up to harness space technology in agriculture. The drones will give a wealth of information. For instance, they could tell accurately if climate is impacting yield.

Some innovations are a lot simpler. The country’s growing mobile subscriber base — projected to overtake US next month — is proving to be handy to tell farmers what to grow or actions to take in case of pest attacks in real time. India’s Internet user base is expected to jump 49% jump over the last year in December to reach 402 million. Of this, 153 million are rural subscribers. Over the course of a year, the government has enrolled 89.3 million farm families for its mobile farm advisories.

Several such projects are on trial. ‘Chaman’ in Hindi means garden. But it is also the high-tech acronym for the “Coordinated Horticulture Assessment and Management” that has used geo-informatics since last year to assess the health of seven horticulture crops grown widely.

FARM SOLUTIONS ARE NOW MOVING FAST TO THE INTERNET, A VAST RURAL MOBILE PHONE SUBSCRIBER BASE AND SPACE-TELECOM TECH

“There is always a problem in getting timely and accurate data, due to which payment of claims to farmers get delayed.

A new high-tech programme Kisan is being launched on a pilot basis to help farmers,” minister of state for agriculture Sanjeev Kumar Balyan said.

An even more critical project is NADAMS developed by the National Remote Sensing Centre that now provides real-time information on drought and its severity level. Currently, it covers 13 states. Small, belated steps but milestones nonetheless.

There is always a problem in getting accurate data, due to which payment of claims to farmers get delayed. A new high-tech programme Kisan is being launched on a pilot basis to help farmers SANJEEV KUMAR, minister of state for agriculture