A crew of interdisciplinary scientists have pop out with an online gadget that guarantees to considerably ease the process of making plans and implementing micro-irrigation programs for agricultural fields. With water increasingly turning into a scarce commodity, farmers and different stakeholders in agricultural sector had been looking for novel concepts to develop more crops from the same quantity of water.
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Micro-irrigation programs involving sprinklers, drippers and other such tools are being increasingly deployed. a Big challenge has been in designing them. There is a want to take note several facets such as how much water could be required, the layout, capability and measurement of the water pipe networks and the collection of sprinklers and drippers that must be deployed. It is a tedious process and involves lot of calculations.
The new machine evolved by the analysis team addresses this factor. Called DOMIS (brief form for Design of Micro-irrigation System), it is a web-based utility and is helping design customised micro-irrigation programs for particular person agricultural fields underneath different agro-climatic prerequisites and circumstances for any crop.
DOMIS, which has an interactive graphical interface, works via three major steps. It first partitions all of the field into blocks of specific dimensions. It then determines probably the most appropriate format plan for the pipes. Finally, it estimates the water requirements of the field and vegetation, in response to native agro-climatic and stipulations.
It does its calculations in response to quite a lot of elements including agro-climatic data of the area, sort and density of vegetation and soil sort, besides the sector size. The design gives solutions when it comes to several facets together with dimension of the pipes in addition to kind and collection of sprinklers which are wanted. It can also pop out with an estimate of the largest fraction of the sector which may also be irrigated in a single cross. Besides, it may give an estimate of expenditure which a farmer or grower would want to install this complete machine in his field.
Speaking to India Science Wire, Dr Neelam Patel, who headed the group, mentioned,
“India has a potential of about 69 million hectares which can be covered through micro-irrigation methods and the Government of India has also allotted about Rs 5,000 crore for a programme to set them up. However, presently, putting up a micro-irrigation requires considerable expertise which is not easily available to a common farmer. This application solves the problem. It can be can be accessed through computers as well as smart-phones.”
The online platform, she mentioned, is also designed to offer information about more than a few govt schemes in agricultural sector, companies promoting and implementing micro-irrigation in several states of India. Its database has data with regards to aspects like agro-climatic prerequisites, major vegetation grown, crop characteristics, ground water availability, soil types for about 642 districts of 29 states and 7 union territories of the rustic.
Besides Dr. Patel, the analysis workforce included T.B.S Rajput and Deepak Kumar, from Water Technology Centre of Indian Agricultural Research Centre, New Delhi; Sita Ram from National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, Kolkatta; and Sushil Kumar Singla from Department of Land Resources beneath the Union Ministry of Rural Development.
