The rapid growth of food needs due to the increasing worldwide population is raising the requirement for smart agriculture. Smart agriculture employs superior technologies such as decision support system, expert system, IoT, GPS, machine learning, robotics, and application of connected devices. Smart agriculture supports an automated farming system that includes a collection of data related to the farming area, and then analyzes the data so that the farmer can make the right decisions in order to grow high-quality products. In smart agriculture, farming-related data are collected using some unusual instruments like sensors, cameras, microcontrollers, and actuators. Then the collected data of farming areas are transferred via the internet to the farmer for decision making. This chapter is aimed to discuss critical topics for the implementation of smart agriculture in India.
TopThe Indian Agriculture
Agriculture is the science, art, or manner of cultivating the soil, yielding crops, and keeping livestock and in diversifying scales, the manufacture, and marketing of the resulting products. Agriculture has been connected with the production of essential food crops, at now agriculture more than traditional farming and includes fisheries, dairy, forestry, fruit cultivation, vegetable production, flowers, and medicinal plant growing, poultry, beekeeping, mushroom, etc. The present time agriculture also included processing, marketing, and distribution of field crops and livestock products. Thus, agriculture could be related operation to as the promotion, production, processing, and distribution of farming products. Agriculture plays an essential role in the life cycle of an economy of the nation. Agriculture is the spine of the economic operation of a given nation. In an extension of providing foods and raw materials, agriculture also contributes to employment opportunities for a large number of the population. The notable expectations from agriculture are:
According to Zion Market Research, the global smart agriculture market was USD 5,098 million in the year 2016 and is expected to reach around USD 15,344 million by the end of 2025 increasing at a CAGR of more than 13.09% between 2017 and 2025.
The climate of India is a typical monsoon, and the average annual rainfall of the whole country is approximately 1170 mm but place-to-place it significantly varies. There are 20 agro-ecological zones in India based on characteristics of the soil, physiographic features, bio-climatic features, and the plant growing period length. All characteristics closely correlated with rainfall, so that rainfall acting a critical role in the climate as well as agriculture of India.
A drought is an environmental or natural disaster in a particular region which creating prolonged shortages in the water supply and whether atmospheric. Just like a human, the life of animals and plants also depend upon the water, When a drought happened the water, and food supply can be limited or discontinued, and their habitat can be damaged. Sometimes the damage for a short time, and their habitat and food supply come back to the normal situation after the drought. According to the world's worst record in food disaster happened in 1943 during British-ruled India known as the Bengal Famine; an estimated 4 million people in the eastern part of India lost their lives due to hunger.