IoT based model of automated agricultural system in India

Abstract

Agriculture has always been the backbone of human civilization and something which has helped us flourish as a species since the beginning. Along with this, agriculture and the associated sectors have always had a major contribution towards India's GDP (Gross Domestic Product). As of 2017, they serve about 17.3 percent of the total GDP of India. Agriculture has also been the largest source of livelihood, for decades, in over 58 percent of the rural households of the country. Over the years, agriculture has seen many technological advancements. Despite this, agricultural practices in India are still largely traditional and are dependent on human involvement in a major way. India has a net sown area of around 14 crore hectares out of which only 47 percent of the land is under irrigation and still majorly depends majorly on good monsoon to fulfil the water requirements. Irrigation aside, farmers also need to know a lot of other problems like not getting enough value for their crops, producing more crops than the demand for that crop and spending excess amount of money in transporting the crops to the market. All this can be avoided if we introduce the technology that has been theoretically present for quite some time but has not been implemented at the ground level, yet. We are talking about IoT (Internet of Things) which is basically a network of objects enabled by internet coupled with the web services that helps in interact with these objects. The IoT network would include three subsystems which would each aim to solve the three major problems stated above. The first would solve the supply-demand anomaly, the next would solve the irrigation problem but would also perform data acquisition using the different sensor nodes. The last subsystem would be aimed at designing such a model that would reduce the transportation costs of the farmers considerably by enabling a pool system wherein every farmer would benefit and reduce their expense.