iRice: Intelligent Platform for Rice Crop monitoring and management

Digital platform real-time crop monitoring and information dissemination

This project aims at developing a digital platform for making information readily available and accessible to
farmers in Indian villages at an affordable cost. Lack of access to expert knowledge is identified as one of the
key reasons for low agricultural productivity in India as farmers don’t follow best agricultural practices or find it
difficult to detect crop diseases early and take necessary remedial actions in time. Crop diseases are
responsible for about 10-15% of annual losses globally including India. In the absence of adequate
information, farmers use pesticides and fertilizers indiscriminately, leading to higher cultivation costs and
environmental and food pollution. Increased cultivation costs and risks of crop failure is considered as a
leading cause of rural-to-urban migration of male labourers, leading to increased feminisation of Indian
agriculture where the women are now left with the dual burden of managing household along with farm
cultivation without any tangible increase in household income. The proposed data-driven platform will address
the pressing need and enable the farmers to carry out real-time and on-demand monitoring of crops and seek
expert guidance throughout the crop cultivation cycle at an affordable cost. Novel research contributions will
be made in the area of image-based crop disease detection and prediction and, developing novel architectures
for effective data collection from fields. The efficacy of the proposed platform will be demonstrated through a
real-world pilot experiment involving farmers. The research outcomes and annotated datasets will be
published through public engagement events, international conferences and journals and project websites.