Agriculture accounts for ~15% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India but employs close to 50% of the working population. Average yield in India is quite low compared to other countries. Advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the government initiatives in e-governance are only promoting e-agriculture in India. This can not only improve the condition of Indian agriculture but also the life and working conditions of the farmers. This paper proposes KisanVikas (Farmer Development), a mobile application, using ICT and promoting e-governance by provide continuous information pertaining to agriculture- weather forecast, crop prices, news, government helplines, and an inventory database manager. The mobile application also connects to an Arduino based wireless sensor network (WSN) comprising soil moisture, pH and temperature sensors to control water pumps for watering small fields, irrigation over the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) and Bluetooth networks.
As Indian economy has diversified and grown, agriculture's contribution to GDP has
steadily declined from 1951 to 2014, yet it is still the largest employment source and
a significant piece of the overall socio-economic development of India. Crop yield
per unit area of all crops have grown since 1950, due to the special emphasis placed
on agriculture in the five-year plans and steady improvements in irrigation,
technology, application of modern agricultural practices and provision of agricultural
credit and subsidies since the Green Revolution in India. However, international
comparisons reveal the average yield in India is generally 30% to 50% of the highest
average yield in the world
There are 38 crore mobile telephones in rural areas, 9 crore farm households and
Internet penetration is currently at 5% but improving
Mobile or smart phones are becoming an essential device for all types of users
irrespective of the age group. High resolution cameras, high definition video with
huge amount of memory; internet browsing through your handset and 3G and
Wireless LAN connectivity; hardware like GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes,
Bluetooth are common to find on smart phones these days. Android, the open-source
mobile operating system developed by Google, is quickly becoming the smart phone
operating system choice for all. As of June'14 there were 57,380,000+ Google
Android and 4,854,000+ Apple iOS users in India [
The Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India, started various schemes in the
interests of the farmers for mobile phones. The mKisan Portal
According to Saravanan R. (2014), there are many mobile advisory services in India, both by private as well as public sectors. Most of these are however regional services offered by the state governments directly or by the center for a particular region. Because of this, there is not only discontinuity in services across the nation but also a language barrier for out-of-state people.
Some initiatives in the public sector are Kissan Helpline (Farmer helpline), Mandi on Mobile Service by BSNL, Kissan Kerala, vKVK (Virtual KrishiVigyan Kendra), and Mobile based Agro-Advisory System in North-East India (m4agriNEI). Private sector services include Fasal (crop), Awaaz de (voice it), Videokheti (video farming), Mandi Bhav (market price).
Extensive research has taken place in this field of using information and communication technology for agricultural purposes. Prabhakar, Jamadagni, & Sudhangathan, (2013) write about a ‘datamule’ which captures data from sensors like soil moisture in the field and is communicated over WiFi network to a mobile phone. Wilton, Hans and Carlos (2014) propose a telemetry system to record soil moisture, temperature data and store into a database for future diagnosis. Ariff, and Ismail (2013) have proposed an android application to maintain a database of various information related to the livestock in the farm. Singhal, Verma, and Shukla (2011) have developed an android application which provides information in the form of crop prices, weather information, farmer loan schemes, etc. to the user. 2 Objectives
As discussed earlier, there is a need to exploit the advances in ICT to foster egovernance which is important as the farmers need to work in tandem with the government and take full advantage of the services provided by it. The proposed mobile application acts as a farmer’s assistant in the field. It provides essential agriculture related information like government helplines, weather forecasts, news, mandi (market) prices of crops to the farmer. There is also an in-built database in which the farmer can keep a track of his inventories, harvests, seeds and fertilizer purchases, vehicles and equipment, etc. He can also document the crop cycle by taking snapshots of the map of the field (displayed within the app) at regular intervals. To reduce the amount of field work for the farmer the application also offers wireless switching on-off of pumps for watering, irrigating. Wireless sensor network of soil moisture sensor, soil pH sensor and soil temperature sensor is connected to an Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller board. The android application controls the pumps over GSM network via SMS (which enables pump control over long distances) and Bluetooth (when in close proximity for real time diagnosis of the sensor readings). We shall next see each feature of the application in detail. 3 Software Features 1: Language support: The application is offered in 8 regional Indian languages namely Hindi, English, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. The user has to choose his preferred language as soon as the application is started. 2: Sign in and Registration: The app requires the user to sign up with his mobile number, a 4 digit numerical password. The user is verified by sending a SMS to this number (i.e. itself) and detecting it. Upon successful verification, the registration details are written through a PHP script and HTTP Client Server APIs into a MySQL database at a remote central server. The database table returns JSON data every time the user attempts a sign in which is parsed to allow further access or not. The registration system architecture as well as the recorded user database table are shown in Figure 1. 3: Weather Forecast: A HTTP Connection is made to the OpenWeatherMap Web service over WiFi/ GPRS which queries the data from servers. The data which the client gets regarding forecast is in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formats. XML provides a language which can be used between different platforms and programming languages and still it can express complex messages and functions. JSON is used primarily to transmit humanreadable text consisting of attribute–value pairs between a server and web application. Figure 2 shows the architecture of retrieving information as well as the weather data, which is in the form of XML and is parsed before being displayed in the application screen. User can search based on current GPS location or directly by city name; the 16 days’ forecast includes information about – weather type, image, min-max temperature, pressure, wind speed, humidity, clouds; graphical trend over the next week of various parameters are also available in the app for visual aid [Figure 3]. These data will enable the farmer to better plan his actions during the agricultural cycle like taking precautionary measures over a predicted hailstorm, and hence safeguard his interests. 4: Commodity Market Prices: Agricultural commodities are traded in mandis (markets) at the district level. The government sets support prices to stabilize the prices but the Mandi prices are dynamic. The farmer, to access these prices enters the date, crop name and the Indian state. The application uses APIs provided by Open Government Data (OGD) – Platform India to make HTTP requests to the Agmarket Portal servers from where data in XML format is received, which, after formatting, is made available on the app in a human-readable form. The result table contains information about market (district name), arrival quantity (in MT), origin, variety, grade, minimum price, maximum price, and modal price (in Rs. / quintal) [Figure 4]. With a rough idea about the prices, the chances of a farmer being exploited and cheated are minimized. 5: Agricultural News: Keeping oneself updated about the happenings in and around the world is essential in taking precautions or planning for a better produce. An HTTP Connection is made to the database/ web server over WiFi/ GPRS which gets the data from AgriFeeds and indiaTogether websites. The data, in the form of RSS Feeds is parsed and then displayed in viewable form. News are obtained using RSS feeds on 82 topics globally, national (pertaining to India) or regional (state-wise news). Clicking on the headlines enables reading of the complete article [Figure 5]. 6: Farm Manager (Inventory management): The application has an in-built farm manager module with which the user can better manage his field and crops. The farmer can keep a track of his assets, inventories and also his cropping cycle. 1: Vehicles and attachments – name, id, purchase date, cost, last, next servicing dates 2: harvested crops – name, quantity, harvest date, amount unsold and check date. 3: seeds and fertilizers - name, quantity, purchase date, cost, quantity remaining. The app also generates alarms based on these dates to remind the farmer about upcoming servicing, maintenance dates. A SQLite database for android is used to manage (insert, edit, delete, view) the data. The SQLite database is exported to the more common Microsoft Excel format (.xlsx) using Android APIs [Figure 6]. 7: Map of Field: Google Maps V2.0 API was used to display the area around the farmer’s current position (supposedly near his field). The map features the terrain, normal, marker only views. The farmer can insert any markers to mark his field boundary. There is also a map screenshot option to take timely snapshots during the crop cycle [Figure 7] to monitor his crop for healthy growth. 8: Farmer Helplines: As stated earlier, the Indian government comes up with time to time schemes and farmer assisting centers fostering e-governance. The Indian government has come up with Kisan Vikas Kendras (KVK), and Kisan Call Centres (KCC) as advisories to respond to issues raised by farmers instantly as well as continuously in their local languages. There is a toll free helpline of the KCC set up by the government at the farmers’ disposal. The application provides the state wise addresses and contact information of the various KVKs and KCCs in the country.
The mobile application is designed to establish a dual communication with an Arduino microcontroller controlled wireless sensor network and water pump. 2 types of wireless networks, namely GSM and Bluetooth [Figure 10], were used to establish this communication channel. 4 sensors measuring soil moisture, soil temperature, soil pH, and air humidity respectively are connected to the microcontroller and they send their data to the android application for diagnosis as well as appropriate decision making on operating the pumps. The system architecture is shown in Figure 9.
Over GSM: The merit of using this communication channel is that it can be operated over long distances too. An Arduino GSM shield with a SIM card was connected to the microcontroller and the wireless sensor network. The farmer queries for the status of the sensors before taking a decision. The SMS received from the microcontroller contains the current pump status and the sensor readings at that very instant. Taking stock of these readings farmer can remotely switch on-off the water pumps by setting the target soil moisture parameter. The pump will be switched ON till the farmer specified soil moisture value is reached.
Over Bluetooth: When the farmer is at his field, he can directly connect the android application with the wireless pump system over Bluetooth. A HC-05 Bluetooth module was connected to the same microcontroller to establish a duplex communication channel between itself and the android smart phone. Data is encrypted, for example, into strings like <!“data”\n!> where “data” is the actual data for example – start; '<' is the start bit, '!' is the start confirm bit, ‘\n’ is the end of data bit. Similarly, '!' is the end bit and '>' is the end confirm bit. This encryption is necessary to avoid any noise (fuzzy data) collected by the sensors from the environment. For example: The string value for retrieving the sensor information is <!“57”,“69”,“24”,“8.2”\n!> which has the various sensor readings in the order of moisture, humidity, temperature and pH. Because this is a real time connection, there is continuous exchange of data at a high rate. The application records the sensor readings every 2 minutes and graphs all the sensor readings over time for diagnosis. The readings are also saved in a local sqlite database table only to be exported to the excel format later [Figure 11]. Fig. 10. Pump operations over GSM; Bluetooth
The mobile application was tested by some local residents of a village and they
expressed an interest to really use the technology. The fact that it was also offered in
multiple regional languages made it easier for them to learn its operation. An
agricultural field setup was made on a table with soil all over. The small submersible
pumps along with the moisture and pH sensors were put in a fixed place with a small
container with mini pipes acting as the water tank. The mobile phone successfully
switched the pumps on and off based on the moisture and other readings, thereby
irrigating the field. The mobile application will truly serve as a great assistant to a
farmer by providing continuous real time information as and when required.
Productivity will increase and a farmer’s time on field or going to nearby cities will
considerably decrease. This ICT revolution promoting e-governance will lead to
more enthusiasm among farmers fostering the need for more information for better
decision making. In the long run, this will lead to overall development in India in the
agricultural sector. The wireless sensor network system is to be made more robust
and self-sufficient by installation of solar panels in the field and housing the
electronic components in proper casings. More features providing information on
availability of seeds and fertilizers, farmer loan and credit schemes will be
incorporated into the application.
[20
from:
April
Economic Survey 2013-14 and Central Statistics Office, Directorate of
Economics and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India, Pocket Book
of Agricultural Statistics- 2014, pg. 19-23. Available from:
<http://www.eands.dacnet.nic.in/latest_2006.htm> [
World Bank Data: Employment in Agriculture (% of total employment)
Available from: <http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS> [
Ministry of from: from:
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