For many years, the Indian agriculture has been lagging behind an don’t adapting to changing world and technology. In India, the agriculture sector plays a vital role in the society as it contributes to 18% of Indian GDP and is a primary source of livelihood for around 58% of the country’s population mainly due to large percentage of people living in rural areas. In the era of globalisation and new innovations, Indian tech start-ups became to mushroom especially in the agriculture sector to come up with idea of optimising this branch of the economy, catching up with rest of the world and increasing the efficiency of this farms. They invented drones-helpers who fly above the farm spreading the pesticides hanged below them in a container. It is incredibly efficient as it is affordable, easier accessible than many workers and it takes a third of a time of a human worker to finish the job. The Indian innovators say that this is not the end of their work and that in the future the robots would be able to make crop analysis like crop growth, plant seeds or water the plants.
In a developed country, the agriculture sector should remain a small fraction of the total GDP – most of it should consist of services. People working in the agriculture usually spend their whole lives there and do not contribute to moving the nation’s innovation and progress forward – therefore do not bring any higher change to the nation. If a larger proportion of a society works in this sector it means that many people would not only not contribute much to the society but also that their primary source of income and wellbeing would depend on how much crops would grow or how the job market looks like at the moment. To combat this problem, Indian star-ups came up with idea of using drones as helpers, to help the Indian farmers save the time, maxims profits, allow them to potentially increase their farms due to more time and most importantly to save unnecessary cheap labour used in farm help in watering plants or collecting crops.
But how the drone works? Well, first of all it has to analyse the whole area of a farm to set the boundaries where it should fly – therefore there has to be some visible point as the limits of the farm so the drone don’t get lost. Then, when the data is uploaded to the system and GPS, the drone can began to be autonomous and fly using patterns from the analysis. And lastly through collected data It can 3D map the whole farm and perform a task.
In terms of what the drone can do there are some things for now. Firstly, it can monitor the irrigation. By using thermal, hyper spectral and multispectral sensors it can recognise whether a plant is too dry and then report the status to the farmer. By this the water efficiency can be improved as a farmer would know which crop needs water the most or which crop should one get rid of, as it is dying. As I mentioned before, the drone can see the health of a plant by different scanners. First, it can detect bacterial of fungal plagues in the early stage and the general appearance of a plant that might suggest its poor condition. This might be especially useful for farmers with thousands or hundred thousand plant, as they don’t have time to check every plant. After finding a dying plant, the drone can adapt this knowledge to the database making it more accurate every other time. More importantly, the drone can do agricultural spraying which limits human contact with harmful chemicals to a minimum. As it is stated in the article
– ‘Professionals say that aerial spraying is five times faster with drones when compared to other methods.’
This technology can undoubtedly help not only Indian economy but also the whole agricultural sector as it speeds up work and maximise the efficiency. More people would then have time and resources to increase their education level and therefore to be able to work in many services related jobs, which is an integral part of advanced societies – large GDP proportion consist of services. It would also limit the poverty and increase the wealth of the citizens. The projects could also bring more investors and this prototype could be used by a base by Indian scientist and technicians for more advanced drones that could one day be doctors or builders.
Sources:
- https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-india-64248510
- https://vtindia.in/the-benefits-of-drones-in-agriculture/
- https://www.equinoxsdrones.com/blog/importance-of-drone-technology-in-indian-agriculture-farming
- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/budget/union-budget-2023-agriculture-sector-needs-fresh-fodder-to-improve-farmer-incomes/articleshow/97458359.cms
- https://omifoundation.medium.com/til-gdp-versus-jobs-92186a6bbbf6
It is great to see how new technologies can help with different problems. In my opinion such drones are the future of farming and would help a lot of farmers around the world. Great blog btw.!
I think involving technologies in the agricultural sector is as important as implementing them in other spheres of work. However, the only difference is that other sectors were already ‘upgraded’ by innovating technologies to some extent. While the agriculture sector suffered from a lack of innovations. So it seems like the idea we indeed needed.