July 2020 will be
remembered for bold decisions by government on abolishing APMCs, SCO, and now
an impetus on FPOs. This follows an earlier
announced policy of making crop insurance optional. All these policy changes have put the focus
on individual farmers. The farmer is on
the pilot’s sea now. A Farmer is free to
decide which crop to grow, where to sell, at which price to sell, or to buy
crop insurance or not.
Approximately 10
years ago, we created a pilot briefing system for Indian Air Force as per their
requirements. It was a tightly monitored project created in consultation with
the best meteorologists and pilots in Indian Air Force. It was cleared at the
highest level and then implemented at all Air Force stations in India. The system was called SIRAVDS.
This flight
briefing system gives pilots the necessary guidance as to what kind of weather
they will face at different heights during the flight time; from take-off to a
safe landing at the destination. It is a complex system wherein meteorological
observations from all sources are pooled, analyzed and plotted with help from
computers for precise geographical locations.
All of this is done automatically and instantaneously.
This work was in
the defense domain. We decided it into
bring to public domain for wider use in India agriculture. We assumed the farmer to be a pilot. We decided to use the same technology, metGIS,
which we had perfect for Indian Air Force be used for Indian farmers. In Indian
farming, weather plays an important role in the crop cycle. Each crop has a cycle of its own. But then, there are many varieties and each
variety too has a different calendar.
Crop calendars created at IMD Pune formed the basis of crop calendar
generation. Syncing meteorology with
agriculture, we later found was much more complicated as several new factors
like radiation, evapotranspiration, soil types, application of fertilizers and
pesticides for different crop at different stages had to be brought together on
one GIS platform. It took us nearly 5
years to stitch together a software which we named metGIS AGRO. We patenting it.
So the technology we
created for IAF pilots is used for farmers of India through our mobile App
FASAL SALAH. Thus farmers are pilots for us. Later we added another dimension
analysing farmers sent crop pictures using artificial intelligence to determine
crop yields before harvest. We were able b to predict before harvest with up to
90% accuracy. Findings of a pilot study
together with IFPRI was presented & published at AGU at Washington in Dec
2018. We found our methodology to be a good tool to predict yield before
harvest.
This tool was recognized and our innovation won the Agriculture
Grand Challenge 2019 award from the Government of India. The press report
published today is pointer to a direction that in times to come, the farmer
will have an option to choose which policy to choose. It will be their choice. A farmer has to evaluate the benefits and
decide. It is not going to be an easy for insurance companies to sell policies
taking advantage of the subsidies provided by central and state governments by
enrollment under compulsory crop insurance. In times to come, even banks cannot
force farmers to take compulsory insurance. Space- age technology is here to
guide farmers throughout their crop cycle based on their individual needs. We
expect FASAL SALAH to be a tool for farmers to exercise right choices in
selection of seeds, various farm inputs and even crop insurance.
All this because the
farmer is a pilot now.
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