Tobacco Agridaksh: An Online Expert System

Abstract

New advances in information technology led to the development of Expert Systems and their application in various sectors including farming. In India, agricultural production has been transformed into a multifaceted business enterprise. Indian agriculture to remain competitive needs the accumulation and integration of scientific knowledge, and information from many diverse sources.  Indian farmer often relies on agricultural specialists, advisors and agricultural research and development institutes for agricultural information for better decision making at the actual farm situation. Unfortunately, timely specialist assistance is not available when the farmer needs. Thus the situation demand for a ‘virtual expert’ who can give personalized expert advice to a large community of farmers, specific to their needs and aspirations considering various knowledge sources. The role of expert systems in tobacco sector and its applications in effective production and protection technologies have been discussed in this article. It is almost impossible for any human expert to consider every piece of available information before arriving at optimal decisions. To overcome this problem and provide precise information to the farmers, “expert systems” have been developed with a primary goal to make expertise available to clients and decision makers who need answers swiftly. The main aim is to deliver the required information and disseminate the up-to-date scientific knowledge in a readily accessible and easily understood form to the farmers. It is one of the most efficient extension tools to take the technology from scientists to the growers directly without any distortion of content which normally creeps in because of multiple agencies involved in conventional technology transfer systems. With this aim, ICAR-Central Tobacco Research Institute has developed a web-based expert system on tobacco using “Agridaksh”- an online tool developed by ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute. This, online expert systems has the tremendous capacity to transfer location specific technologies and advice to the farmers with a greater precision