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To: Indian Agricultural Research Institute

From: Digvijay Singh Rathore (Central Academy Senior Secondary School), Sariyya Mammadzada (QSI Baku International School), and Rachana Kommineni (Cedar Park High School)

The deficient agricultural conditions of Indian farms, including the lack of adequate technical resources to excel in lucrative, nutritious cultivation, have deprived the national Indian society of their proper dietary needs. The difficult and unclear detection of crop diseases contributes to the loss of vast amounts of nutritious food and thus contributes to the food insecurity the nation faces. This negatively affects Indian society as it generates a population of hunger and dependability on imports of processed food. Additionally, with the governmental imposition of the new controversial “Farm Bill'' policies that disrupt the marketing system, farmers are in urgent need of agricultural improvement. The Bean App leverages computer vision technologies to detect if a set of crops has pathogens. Widespread installation among Indian farmers will ensure that they have the technical assistance needed to efficiently identify diseases and treat them accordingly.

Introduction

The lack of disease control in India has detrimentally affected its rapidly growing population. With only 10% of the country's investment emphasized towards agriculture, farmers have been deprived of access to essential tools and knowledge about agrology and agrotechnology. The absence of government support only indicates how vital it is to address this issue at hand and help alleviate some of the stresses farmers endure. It is estimated that around 16,000 Indian farmers die due to suicide every year — most due to the socio-economic issues they were facing. 

Crop diseases bring various social and environmental financial concerns as well. Each crop has economic value, India loses $500 billion each year due to numerous diseased crops. Additionally, the lack of domestic food yields the need for processed food importation, making it difficult for the average classed families to access nutritious food.

Upon interviewing the farmers mainly from west India and a few other parts of the nation, we found that even individuals with years of experience in agriculture struggle to accurately diagnose plant diseases. This results in a significant outlay for incorrect medication. Hiring experts or seeking advice from government professionals isn’t accessible because of the funds required and inadequate availability in all regions of the country. 

The proposal for the Bean App will help tackle the matter of unclear crop disease detection as it will enable farmers to efficiently facilitate disease management of crops. It is a downloadable free app that recognizes disease through a machine learning-enabled computerized analysis of a picture. Better yet, it can even diagnose a set of plants rather than one with over 84% accuracy, considering the limited dataset we had. With more resources, in terms of computer power and datasets for a varied range of plants, we can train extremely accurate and faster ML models. 

Recommendation

The fundamental issue is the effective detection of disease within crop fields. The Bean App can decipher this issue through the integration of Artificial Intelligence into daily farm life. With a camera lens, the application will analyze the health conditions of a set of plants. Furthermore, with the objective of accessibility of resources to Indian farmers, the application will be free of charge. Any additional features will be purchased separately by individuals at their own convenience and will have no affiliation to the organization. 

Although the Bean App is technologically advanced, it is crucial to accentuate the limitations farmers may be faced with when using it. One of the major setbacks is the distribution and awareness of Bean within the Indian population. The lack of networking connections can toughen the process of advertisement. Despite this, already established village administration authorities can ease the process of spreading awareness. The fact that over half a billion of the rural population have smartphones makes the Bean App a much more accessible solution. On top of that, the infrastructure around internet access in India is growing rapidly and it is expected to have the most active internet users in the upcoming years.

The implementation of the application to crop fields is strongly recommended to farmers in India. It offers a technological solution to enhance agricultural growth and rural development. Existing policies are no longer feasible to modern Indian agronomy as they fail to prioritize food security measures and agricultural progress. According to the World Bank, “India’s rice yields are one-third of China’s and about half of those in Vietnam and Indonesia. The same is true for most other agricultural commodities.” With numerous evidence from studies such as this one, it is conspicuous that agricultural productivity has significantly declined. Despite this, India can gain agricultural fertility once more through the support of technological tools such as the Bean App. 

Impact

The Bean App addresses the socioeconomic and environmental needs of farmers. It will allow better facilitation of crop fields and will hamper the numerous diseased products since farmers will now be more aware of the conditions of their crops. In the broader context, it can assist India’s dietary needs as there will be less importation of processed foods and more access to domestic, nutritious food. 

References available in full pdf.