Nokia and Vodafone India Foundation, the CSR arm of Vi, on Tuesday announced that they have deployed a Smart Agriculture solution that aims to improve the productivity of farmers in India.
The pilot of Vodafone India Foundation’s SmartAgri project is being implemented in 100 locations in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra and will benefit over 50,000 farmers in the region by enhancing their productivity and income. The smart agriculture-as-a-service solution, which utilizes Nokia’s Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) solution, will ensure that precise and practical data is sent to farmers enabling them to enhance productivity.
Over 400 sensors have been deployed over 100,000 hectares of farmland to collect various data points which are then analysed by a cloud-based and localized Smart Agriculture app. The app provides local language support as well as weather forecast and irrigation management information. The sensors generate insights that helps to improve soy and cotton crop yields. Crop management through WING can include smart irrigation, smart pesticide control, proactive information sharing frameworks on crops and weather, as well as a platform for commodity exchange. The use case can also employ Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) technology or drones instead of traditional sensors for crop management.
Ankur Bhan, Head of Nokia WING Business at Nokia
Together with the Vodafone Foundation, our managed service offering will help an initial 50,000 farmers and their families, with the aim of rolling out the solution across India.
P. Balaji, Chief Regulatory & Corporate Affairs Officer, Vodafone Idea
Smart crop management using Smart IoT and AI based solutions is transforming the prevalent agricultural practices into more ‘intelligent’ ones enabling farmers with smart decision making and helping them improve production and crop quality through better utilization of resources.
