Guwahati, September 22: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today called upon the students and faculties of Guwahati-IIT to strive for innovative technology to facilitate fast-track development of the ‘potent and resourceful’ North-eastern region of the country.

Addressing the convocation of the IIT-Guwahati virtually, the Prime Minister said that the resourceful North-eastern region of the country which has tremendous potential, is fraught with hurdles of various natural and industrial disasters and calamities on its path of development and the community in IIT-Guwahati could do a lot towards mitigating and removing these barriers.

He also called upon IIT graduates to strive for becoming game changer in their chosen fields so that the entire IIT community as well as the country take pride in them.

“National Education Policy will establish India as an international education destination. Our high performing institutions will be encouraged to set up campuses abroad. IIT-Guwahati has to play a key role in this vision of beyond boundaries expansion,” PM Narendra Modi said while referring to the new National Education Policy during his convocation speech.

 
 
Guwahati, Dec 15: An agri-tech startup, co-founded by the students of Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT-G), alumni of National Institute of Technology (NIT) Silchar and Dibrugarh University, has developed a multi-lingual smartphone application – AgSpeak – for farmers.
 
AgSpert has developed the application to optimise in-farm productivity through artificial intelligence (AI).
 
“The application launched by IIT-G director T. G. Sitharam on Sunday, will help farmers make decisions and manage farm activities with the click of a button,” a statement issued here by the institute on Tuesday, said.
 
The application is multi-lingual and has an option of Assamese as well. This feature is a first among all the agri-tech applications available in the market.
 
AgSpeak is driven by hyper local crop data coming from satellite and smart IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
 
“The application considers up to 20 local crop parameters which are key indicators of their health like temperature, rainfall, sunlight hours and soil health status to alert farmers about probable crop threats in advance and suggest best practices to tackle threats, hence optimising the resources used and maximising productivity,” the statement said.
 
The app along with the IOT hardware has been tested for the past three months with 500 farmers and two tea estates. 
 
“Some of the major breakthroughs by the algorithm were precise prediction of blight (disease) in potatoes, tea mosquito bug along with water stress in winter crops. These are major reasons of woes to farmers and small tea growers of Assam and cause crop damage if not controlled in time,” it said. 
 
Major commercial users of the product include commercial plantation farms. Nearly 250 farmers have already been provided hands on training in utilising the full potential of the app.
 
“However, the user friendliness and multilingual features of the app make it extremely easy for farmers to use and seldom require training,” the statement added.  
 
Currently a self-funded start-up, AgSpert is leading the initiative in North-Eastern India which has untapped potential with diverse ecosystems having agriculture as the major economic activity.