International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2017)
Agricultural Management using Cloud Computing
in India
Dinesh Kumar Baghel
Assistant Professor, SCSE
University of Petroleum and Energy Studies
Dehradun, India
dbaghel@ddn.upes.ac.in
Abstract—Although agriculture now accounts for only 14
percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), rapid growth of
agriculture in India is critical for inclusiveness. Information
Communication and Technology (ICT) provides greater role in
offering greater expertise to producers regarding pricing, good
quality seed information, fertilizers, disease detail, sharing new
discoveries of scientists working at various Agricultural
Institutes. An effective implementation of cloud computing in
agricultural sector is encouraging and required for overall
development of agricultural sector of India. There are potential
risks in cloud computing which if properly addressed can be a
potent ICT tool in agricultural sector in India. Considering the
benefits of cloud computing, a design is proposed for Indian
agricultural sector and two performance metrics are discussed
which can be used to assess any cloud based application.
Keywords— ICT; Cloud Computing; agriculture; Service Level
Agreement.
I. INTRODUCTION
People learned to grow, harvest and sell crops for their living
and benefits for centuries; they always seek for information
exchange for increasing their profits. Changing but by no
means limited factors such as weather conditions, soil fertility,
pests and disease and changing agricultural trends to high-
value agricultural trends by sharing information and adopting
discoveries of researchers in agricultural sector affects the
final outcome. Latest, crucial and timely knowledge can help
the farmers to deal with these changes effectively. In
developing countries agriculture is highly localized which
prevents information sharing [4]. Hence the ability to
aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources will soon
generate breakthrough in agriculture. Other areas like weather
forecasting, threat prediction, environmental, meteorological,
census data etc. can also benefit from this approach [11].
According to annual agricultural report India contains 2.4% of
the world’s geographical area and has 4% of world’s water
resources [12]. The agriculture and allied sector contributed
14% for Nation’s GDP and shared in India’s export to about
13.08% in 2012-13 [13][14]. 62% population of India is
directly or indirectly depends on agriculture [15]. Hence rapid
growth of agricultural production is necessary for GDP as well
as meeting the rising demand for food. This can be done by
providing right information at right time to farmers and
sharing information among them [12]. ICT plays an important
role and an efficient information system can be of great help to
ISBN: 978-1-5090-6471-7/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Arun Singh, Pratyush Kumar Deka
Assistant Professor, SCSE
Galgotias University
Greater Noida, India
{arun.singh, pratyush.deka}@galgotiasuniversity.edu.in
expand India’s agriculture production. The life style of Indian
farmers and farming is also varying rapidly due to increase in
non-agricultural opportunities. The technological innovation
in agriculture is not reaching to the producers because of
illiteracy, lack of awareness, communication gap etc. which
results in failure of achieving possible production rate. The
loss is growing more than 40% in worldwide which include
more than 19.1% of loss due to disease caused, bacteria, virus
and fungi, 10.2% due to insects attack and 12.2% due to
weeds [1][8].
Investment in setting up the ICT infrastructure and their
maintenance is high. Hence there is a need for the cheap and
user friendly ICT tool for agriculture sector which can handle
increasing large data volume, scalability, manpower, require
less maintenance and can help in reducing the steep rise in the
price of energy and food, mainly caused by factors such as
population growth, poor trade and market policy in developing
countries.
ICT is playing a major role in every sector from research to
day-to-day activities like medical imaging, financial services,
communication with the help of emerging techniques such as
computer vision, machine learning, mobile and cloud
computing [1][16]. For developing countries like India where
agriculture is the main source of income and the people’s
livelihood, development of ICT tools in agriculture and allied
sector is required for further economic progress. But, high cost
investment is a barrier to establish ICT infrastructure. Cloud
computing will act as an ICT tool which is faster, efficient,
reliable and user-friendly and play an important role is
developing the Indian agricultural sector and strong agro
information base [2][16].
The magic of cloud computing is that user can avail the
services of it on pay-per-use basis irrespective of location and
time. It does not require installation and maintenance of
software at their device, thereby reducing manpower and
maintenance required of those services and improve
information sharing and integration [4][16]. So developing
cloud computing application is an important opportunity to
carry out industry applications for agriculture and also
necessary for developing centralized, controlled agro
information base for gaining optimal benefit [5].
Currently, the countries in the world for the study of cloud
computing technology are not very mature. Research in
developed countries started earlier, and has good results in the
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 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2017)

basic framework, technical support, platform building.
Information Technology companies like Amazon, Google,
Microsoft, HP, IBM, Oracle and so on have deeply realized
the huge market potential and business opportunities in the
field of “Cloud Computing”, and all have been engaging in
these studies.
II. CLOUD COMPUTING OVERVIEW
In public communication and literature ideas about
computation as a public utility emerged in 1960s. Information
Systems Professor Ramnath Chellappa first used the term
“Cloud Computing” in 1997. In 2006 Amazon offered
“Amazon Web Services” as a cloud computing service to
customers [17].
Cloud computing known as third IT revolution, refers to the
fact that services are available in a very simple and affordable
manner without having to know the service provider and all the
technicalities are hidden by the cloud. Cloud computing
services can be availed whenever and wherever users needed
and like any utility bills (e.g. gas, electricity, water etc.). Users
will pay according to their usage-a metering pay feature or paid
service usage model. It offers users less manpower
participation, low maintenance, super computing capabilities,
reduced resource inputs and waste because complex and huge
computing is split and distributed over a large number of
servers over the computer network which results in availability
of ultra-huge amount of information services within seconds
[6].
When it comes to its definition, National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as
“Cloud Computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous,
convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources(e.g. networks, servers,
storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction. This cloud is composed of five
essential characteristics, three service models, and four
deployment models.” [18]. According to the Cloud Security
Alliance and NIST guidelines for cloud computing, it has four
different deployment models namely private, community,
public and hybrid. Beside this based on user requirement, cloud
computing offers the IaaS, PaaS, SaaS basic models to deliver
the services. It is shown by Fig 1 [4].
Some key facts about cloud computing:
x Cloud computing consumes 1/10 the energy of a PC.
From mid-2008 organizations started switching from
company owned hardware to cloud services [17].
x According to a survey done among 250 companies the
following three prominent features were found to be
uplifting of cloud computing- efficiency, capital cost
reduction and alleviating staffing issue [17].
x The shift of traditional ICT trends towards cloud
computing has gone from $46.41 billion in 2008 to
$150 billion in 2014 with potential to reach over $200
billion by 2016 [19].
x According to a report by BSA, The Software Alliance,
in 2013 BSA Cloud Computing Scorecard several
countries have made significant improvements in
policy environment for the BSA indexed areas. This
shows their readiness towards adopting the cloud
computing environment with Japan as the leading
country and India holding the seventeenth position- an
improvement of two places from last year [20].
Fig. 1. NIST Cloud Computing Framework
Cloud computing have five universal values [7]:
x Reduction of initial cost.
x Allocation of resources on demand without limit.
x Maintenance and upgrades performed in the back-end.
x Easy rapid development including collaboration with
other systems in the cloud.
x More possibilities for global service development.
Participants involved in cloud computing [3]:
x Stakeholders who are interested in only using the
application and they don’t have to know anything
about the underlying technology. These are the end
users.
x Business management who is responsible for the
governance of data or services in cloud. Cloud service
providers must provide security as well guaranteed
and predictable services.
x In the end lies the cloud service provider who has the
responsibility of IT assets and maintenance.
In common usage the tem “Cloud” is essentially a metaphor for
the internet. The following basic services are offered by the
cloud computing:
A. Software as a Service (SaaS):
This model offers ICT tools such as software, web
applications etc., without the need to buy and install them in
specific machines and are accessible from various client
devices through thin client interface or program interface.
Another promising feature of this model is that users are

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 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2017)
charged on pay-per-use basis and they don’t have to manage
the underlying cloud infrastructure [18].
B. Platform as a Service (PaaS):
In this model consumer of cloud are offered computing
environment so that they can deploy into cloud infrastructure
consumer-created or acquainted application created using
programming languages, libraries and other tools supported by
the provider without worrying about the cloud infrastructure
and has control over configuration settings [18].
C. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):
This form of cloud computing usually includes
components that are used in availing ICT services, such as
virtual computers, data centers, traffic monitoring and
redirecting, basic network components, operating systems
where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary
software. They don’t manage the cloud infrastructure; instead
of that possibly they are offered limited control of electing
networking components (e.g. firewalls). This is the most
outstanding benefit of cloud computing as the organizations
invest the most in establishing the infrastructure [18].
III. CHARACTERISTICS OF CLOUD COMPUTING
These delivery models form the core of the cloud and they
exhibit certain characteristics which are as follows:
x Simplicity: It is simple to use and setup all the
services without having to worry about resource
management and underlying cloud infrastructure.
x High Elasticity: According to consumer demand,
provider’s computing resources can be pooled
dynamically to serve multiple consumers using a
multi-tenant model. It has the capability to scale
rapidly outward and inward commensurate with
demand.
x High Reliability: Cloud computing can handle the
failed node automatically and ensure the computing
and related applications can run smoothly [5].
x High Flexibility: cloud services are transparent in
that users don’t have to master the cloud computing
mechanism in order to avail the services.
x Collaboration: Since all the applications are on
cloud, it becomes a natural fit for consumers to
effectively collaborate on a common project or
application.
x Low Cost: For infrequent users, it provides services
on pay-per-use basis without purchasing expensive
equipment which also reduces cost and knowledge
requirement.
x High Impendence: Consumers can access the
services through heterogeneous thin or thick client
platforms (e.g. mobile phones, laptops, tablets etc.).
Location independency is also achieved in that end-
user generally has no control or knowledge over the
exact location of provided resources like obtaining
information and services by the internet. Sometimes
it offers higher level of location information (e.g.
country, state etc.).
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IV. ISSUES RELATED TO CLOUD COMPUTING
Some issues related to cloud computing are illustrated
below:
x Privacy and Security: Issues regarding proprietary
data, security of data since data is being accessed
outside their space should be considered for fast
access and prevention of loss of data it should be
mirrored in multiple sites and hence making it more
vulnerable. Besides it data should be stored on
geographically far apart sites to avoid data damage
which could occur if we group such data at one
physical location [9].
x Standards: In order to ensure neutrality while
moving entire operations uniformly issues regarding
accessing storing, modification is there [9].
x Legality: Ownership agreements like “Do the cloud
service providers also have the ownership for
enterprise data, intellectual property issues are there
when the service is provided by third party? [9]”
x Mentality: Ownership mentality should be
relinquished to some extent for widely accepting
cloud computing [9].
x Pricing theory: For the long run pricing theory need
to be revisited [9].
Apart from that compliance, vendor lock-in and
enterprise/user inertia are some other issues that needs
attention. These cloud computing concerns are quickly
amplified when coupled with internet [11].
V. POTENTIAL SUGGESTED ACTIONS AND AREAS FOR
FUTURE STUDY
Some of the key areas that need attention and further study
in order to provide seamless cloud computing operation are
mentioned below [11]:
x Transparency on where data is located, provider’s
performance.
x Well defined metrics on SLAs (Service Level
Agreement).
x Establishing standards in metrics for import/export of
data service, quality interface to cloud services and
minimum service requirements.
x Development of commonly accepted taxonomy of
cloud services towards explaining an often fuzzy
concept. Collecting and publishing various case
studies to clearly explain the potential bottom-line
benefits to corporate and government institutions and
the advances they have achieved in this area.
x Policy makers can learn from more “mature”
infrastructure industries such as banking and
transportation.
x Increased collaboration among IT industries and
government to make all above points to happen as
well as creating “mutual aid” agreement organization
wise in case of attack or failure of service and in
improving network infrastructure also.
 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2017)
VI. COMMON ISSUES IN AGRICULTURE
In India numerous ICT projects by government and private
sector organizations are running like E-choupal, ikissan
Kendra, AGMARKNET, Raitha Samparka Kendra Online,
Agriwatch.com etc., but poor IT infrastructure, less
communication to remote areas, poor knowledge and
awareness hindered the progress of these projects [4]. In the
rural areas, since producer’s ability is limited which if coupled
with low educational level exhibits operating feasibility
problems for producers.
Sometimes the quality of the information is low, which
cannot satisfy the producers’ reality needs and hence bother
producers in applying practical information and have less
impact on farmers. Different agencies with different
agricultural information resources characteristics exist. It often
offers advisory problem to farmers as to whom they should
consult.
Smallholder producers are asset poor. They lack required
financial investment to acquire inputs for production and
commercialization [21]. Inefficient utilization of existing
resources like modern agricultural production equipment,
agricultural machinery, which results in regional agricultural
production differences and also leads to strong dependence on
natural climate [3].
Inappropriate technical guidance in areas like breeding
pollution-free crop cultivation fertilizer, irrigation and soil
improvement, livestock breeding, weather forecasting etc.
leaves farmers in a state of blind conformity [3]. Producers
have less information about input output of market, quality
and quantity parameters than traders mainly because they are
price takers. Seasonal variation in price causes them to dispose
their production soon after harvest. Apart from that
smallholder farmers also deal in small village markets [21].
They have poor infrastructure such as road,
telecommunication, electricity and water which further hinder
their market access. They failed to represent themselves as
“Farmer Organization” and hence unable to take advantage of
benefit of collective bargaining power [10][21].
Commercializing small holder agriculture can boost agrarian
development which requires efficient market rich in market
information, transportation and profitable pricing system and
capital. It reduces the opportunistic behavior between traders
and farmers. Therefore an alternative model to integrate
farmers into better paying commodity chain values is required
[21].
Kiosks at the grass root level, information islands due to
agriculture localized nature, less utilization of equipment
resources and regional facilities and less co-operation
mechanisms of technical resources are other issues [4][6].
VII. CLOUD COMPUTING USE IN ADDRESSING THESE
CHALLENGES AND PROPOSED MODEL
Agricultural information resources mode and services are
changing with time from face to face interaction to printed
material, media, telephone, network etc. as the external
environment changes for transferring information to producers
[5].
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In order to overcome the farmer’s limited ability and
educational level readiness for adopting cloud computing is
required to seek expert advice for expert decision making [16].
Cloud computing can be considered as composed of two parts.
First is to fulfill requirement with user friendly interface and
faster approach. Second, store all relevant data in centralized
cloud location [16]. First part generally provides services like
mentioned below [16]:
x Current demand and supply information of
agricultural products in different parts of the country.
x Communication in form of text, image, audio, visual
facility in native language in which they are
comfortable so that an illiterate person can also
understand the vital disseminated information.
x Communication devices should be there.
x Knowledge sharing- apart from sharing local
information the system should also incorporate
information from agro experts/researchers and
updated via a proper knowledge sharing mechanism.
Producers can access all these information with the
help of Commodity Information Centers (CIC) and
be aware of all these recent agro related information
via a proper co-operation mechanism.
Second generally provide services mentioned below [16]:
x Agro data bank- An agro data bank which contains
agricultural information in a centralized cloud should
also is there for researchers to extract agricultural
data for further analysis and devise some new method
in agriculture sector for the benefit of nation.
Agro data bank should contain [16]:
x Recently grown region wise crop related information,
region wise weather information along with forecast
for some time duration.
x Temporal information regarding the behavior of soil
in past in order to forecast the future trend of soil
x Crop growth monitoring module to analyze crop
growth in different regions on regular basis and
compare it with past
x Region wise farmer related data to assess their
involvement in Indian Agricultural activities. It will
be of great help for policy makers to take decision on
encouraging and promoting agriculture.
x FOPS (frequently occurring problem session) should
also be there to provide solution to frequently
occurring problems. Provision to incorporate new
unattended problem seeking for expert solution from
experts should also be there.
Cloud computing offers people who don’t understand
computers ease of use just like any other utility such as
water, electricity, gas etc. cloud computing also helps in
construction and improvement of agricultural products
supply chain with the help of easy information exchange
 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2017)
Fig. 2. Layered Architecture for Cloud Services
and communication between producers and enterprises,
thereby increasing producers profit [9]. The cloud
computing platform hence acts as a Back Box between
producers and agricultural information services. It helps
in providing highly qualified unified services to producers
on time [5].
A nationwide group NACIIC (National Agriculture Cloud
Innovation and Incubator Center) can be formed to benefit
agriculture industry from cloud computing.
Recently a study in Japan is carried out for the connection
between agriculture and cloud computing. They regarded
agriculture production as a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle.
In this production data is routinely collected and suggestions
are retrieved by analysis engine such as data miners which
operate on this large amount of data. Maintenance is easy as
modification is done to the software on a single system in the
cloud. Detailed discussion on this is given in [7].
There are some few concerns which further hinders the
nationwide applicability of cloud computing. Some of which
are conflict in country laws, high bandwidth requirement for
better network connectivity to optimally use the cloud
services. Alternative is to use text based services through
mobile devices in native language [16].
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Fig. 2 shows a simple proposed layered architecture for
cloud services which promotes vertical and horizontal
development.
Benefits of the proposed model are:
x Better and organized data management by a team of
professionals.
x Data readiness.
x Increased local and global communication which will
result in motivated farmers.
x Reduced rural urban migration and hence increased
employment.
x Reduction in required man power, maintenance and
infrastructure.
x Reduced gap between traders and sellers.
VIII. PERFORMANCE METRIC FOR FRAMEWORK
Performance for cloud computing application can be
assessed based on the following factors:
Cost, service time, agility, suitability which is measured as
 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA2017)

Suitability= [12] Dept. of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of

݊‫ ݊݋݂݊݋ݎܾ݁݉ݑ‬െ ݁‫݁ܿ݅ݒݎ݁ܵݕܾ݀݁݀݅ݒ݋ݎ݌ݏ݁ݎݑݐܽ݁ܨ݈ܽ݅ݐ݊݁ݏݏ‬ India, “State of Indian Agriculture 2012-2013,” New Delhi, 2013.
[Online]. Available: http://agricoop.nic.in/Annual%20report2012-
݊‫ ݊݋݂݊݋ݎܾ݁݉ݑ‬െ ݁‫ݎ݁݉݋ݐݏݑܥ݄݁ݐݕܾ݀݁ݎ݅ݑݍ݁ݎݏ݁ݎݑݐܽ݁ܨ݈ܽ݅ݐ݊݁ݏݏ‬ 13/ARE2012-13.pdf
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