IIT Mandi has  carved a niche for itself as an institution dedicated to pushing tech solutions for the socio-economic benefit of the people in the Himalayan belt. We caught up with Dr. Srikant Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi who is currently part of the institute’s research project which integrates IoT for the development of agriculture.  He shed light on the evolving role of IoT and how his team is using technology to help farmers from Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh cultivate a better yield.

Can you tell us about your current role and your current research areas?

Presently, I am working on applied aspects of IoT, where it is applied to agriculture. IIT Mandi has launched a project called Farmer Zone for improving the livelihood of the farmer and we are starting off with potato farmers. This is where we use the Internet of Things (IoT) systems which can be deployed in the field as micro-weather stations, in order to get data in real-time and collate this information in a cloud-based system, which will be further processed to give timely advisory to farmers that includes information like what is the right time to sow, harvest, early warnings of diseases or pests. These are some of the areas in applied IoT, that we are working on.

Can you tell us about the development in IoT in outdoor environment?

One of the interesting aspects of IoT is that the hardware investment is pretty-low when compared to traditional technology infrastructure. While the rest of the world is heavily industrialised, in India, I find there is a great opportunity where we can bring this systems which are compact, easily-deployable so that people in remote corners of the country can afford this, just like the advent of smartphones.

The problem that we have decided to tackle is enormous and  complex and one of the focus areas is gaining farmer’s trust in technology.  To start off, we have registered 500 farmers in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh and 200 farmers from Himachal Pradesh in the first phase, where we are talking to the farmers and collecting soil samples, finding out soil parameters and providing them with this information. We are also capturing the images of the field where our back-end servers will process these images and tell whether the plants are infected with pest, caterpillar attack and so on.

We do this in a timely manner as the diseases spread very quickly over a vast area and to tackle this issue, you need an automated system which can capture data and give information to the farmers. The second thing is, we need very precise information on the capturing of these pest information or the farmers will end-up spraying the entire field multiple times. Thus by doing this, we will be able to reduce the input cost of the farmers and protect the environment to a large extent.

Can you tell us about Raspberry Pi and what can be their applications in the industry be?

We are procuring sensors from different organisations based on the initiatives that they have taken, we then buy off the shelves micro-controller and then code them so that these systems will consume low power. Then we do its packaging, so that it can stay out  in the field. This is particularly important because unlike indoor systems, we can’t use electric systems for outdoor purposes and we have to run the systems using renewable energy. We also have standalone systems which are deployed in the field that are transmitting data.

The IoT part comes in when we insert a simple sim card into these devices for the purpose of data transferring. But, if you need special resolution, we can have multiple of these devices communicating with each other using different protocols and and then there can be one gateway node which will be transferring the net information to a cloud data-base

Where do you see the IoT market in India heading and how can India capitalize on its research to improve areas like agriculture?

IoT is booming and one main reason for it is the number of engineering and technical students graduating from colleges. Since, IoT is democratising everybody’s access to technology, people are finding newer means and applications using the technology.

Can you stress on the importance of pushing research forward in India and the need for more doctoral researchers?

Research in essence will enable us to stand independently and we don’t want to import technology from outside. With regards to IoT, AI and ML, there  is a great opportunity to bring rural people into the mainstream education as anyone would like to see the immediate outcome of the work. Writing a complex code for general population can be a barrier for them as not will be able to comprehend it. But, if you have a piece of code that help someone monitor say, the energy or water consumption of the house, these will popularise the coding culture among the youth.

IIT Mandi playing a pivotal role in pushing research forward and what are the core areas?

At IIT Mandi, one of the focus areas is to empower the local population and improve the education index and improve the challenges faced in Himalayan regions, when of the interesting aspect about IoT is that you can get local population interested in technology and serve as a technology platform for them to be tech savvy.

At IIT Mandi, independent of whether you are a civil engineer or mechanical engineer, at undergrad-level we have a 2-3 mandatory courses for everybody as there are no areas which is free of big-data now. Data has become a necessary tool and just like how you were taught English along with regional languages in school, data science has become a second-language.

We also have IIT Mandi technology incubator called the Catalyst where we see a lot of young kids coming with a fresh new ideas. Once you have empowered the youths with low-cost technology then it is going to change how things are going to happen here.