SEA - 2019

Extended abstract submitted for review.

Computer Technology for Solving Agriculture Issues

of Tribal in India
Jaynarayan T Tudu 1 *

Abstract
In this work we address two problems which are specific to the issues of tribal in India. The objective of this work
is to use the current computer technology to solve the problem that would enhance the economic and livelihood
of tribal. We address two problems: one is to find out behaviour pattern of tribal livelihood and the second is
to enhance the agricultural productivity. The main focus of this work is to formulate the problem that would be
solvable using the specific technology of data analysis and subsequently by the use of connected technology
and machine learning.
Keywords
Tribal agriculture, Precision agriculture, Data analysis, and Machine learning
1 Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, India

*Corresponding author: jtt@iittp.ac.in

Extended Abstract
The progress of science and technology has brought about a
shift in the day-to-day living. The technological capabilities
has solved numerous problems related to livelihood of human
being. It has brought a revolutionary changes in many of the
fields such as transportation, communication, computation,
manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare among others. Despite
the fact stated, there still have been numerous unsolved prob-
lems, which are original and some are byproduct. One of the
problems is the problem pertaining to the economic empower-
ment of tribal community. United Nation estimates that there
have been around 370 million indigenous people currently
living in around 90 different countries. The total population of
indigenous people figures around 5-6% of the total population.
In India the total population according to the 2011 census is
1.045 billion which is around 8.6% of the total population of
India. If we look at closely the economic parameters such
as per-capita income, we find that around 45% to 50% tribal
population is below the poverty line. More relevantly, if we
look at the states of India we find that the states where the
tribal population is large has the large percentage of popu-
lation below the poverty line. All these data certainly gives
us a hint that the economic (and of course socio-economic)
problem of tribal population has remained unsolved. Despite
the uninterrupted effort being tried from various domain of
expertise the problem as we witness now has remained un-
solved. This also indicate that the problem is not an easy to
solve and it probably requires some of the modern tools and
mind to solve.
In this work we identify some of the problems which are
specific to the tribal community living in India. The problems
of our interest and their solution lies in the domain of computer
science. In this work the problems have been formulated to
be solved using the methodologies of computer science and
engineering. One of the important optimization parameter for
each of these technology is the cost, the solution has to be cost
effective. Some of the relevant problems and solutions that
are already being proposed and currently being used will be
presented. We will be discussing the following two problems
which will have immediate economic impact in the lives of
tribal.
1. Organised tribal data analysis:
There have been several agencies, government as
well as private, working to solve different socio-
economy problems of the tribal. In that process
we observe that a good amount of data of various
kind have been gathered in isolate for study and as-
sessment of different parameters. However, what
we observe is that there have not been any attempt
so far made to perform analysis on these data to
understand the detailed social behaviour, resource
consumption pattern, agriculture production and
others. Such results would be extremely useful
for planning the different economical activities.
In this part of the work we aim to develop a
methodology for data collection, date refinement
and curation, analysis and finally making use of
the analysed result for the ultimate purpose of
economic development.
2. Precision agriculture in hilly regions:
Most of the tribal community particularly in India
are located in the geographical regions that is ei-
 Computer Technology for Solving Agriculture Issues of Tribal in India — 2/2
ther Hilly or uneven surface structure. Doing agri-
culture in such regions has its own challenge in
terms irrigation, cultivation, harvest and periodic
assessment of crop health. It has also been ob-
served and studied that most of the land region in
tribal dominated areas are suitable only for partial
farming during the rainy reasons and due to sev-
eral reason, as of now, many of them remain un-
cultivated and that leads to under cultivation. We
attempt to solve all these farming issues with the
help of current technology which enables a farmer
to carry out the precise and demand specific farm-
ing. The enabler to carry out such farming is the
contemporary technology related to health mon-
itoring of the crop, land, wanted, and fertilizer
which would enhance the harvest and do it timely.
The technology related to village area network,
internet of connected devices and remote comput-
ing infrastructure would be experimented to bring
in the viable solution to enhance the harvest.
References
[1] Ministry of Tribal Affair, Govt of India. Annual Report -
2018-19. Govt of India, 2019.
[2] Maitreyi Bordia Das, Gillet Hall, Soumya Kapoor, Denis
Niketin. Indigenous People, Poverty and Development,
Chapter 6: The Schedule Tribes India. World Bank, 2005.
[3] A. K. Tripathy, J. Adinarayana, D. Sudharsan, S. N. Mer-
chant, U. B. Desai, K. Vijayalakshmi, D. Raji Reddy, G.
Sreenivas, S. Ninomiya, M Hirafuji, T. Kiura, K. Tanaka.
Data Mining and Wireless Sensor Network for Agricul-
ture Pest/Disease Predictions. IEEE World Congress on
Information and Communication Technologies, 2011.
[4]
Tamogh Ojha, Sudip Misra, Narendra Singh Raghuwanshi.
Wireless sensor networks for agriculture: The state-of-
the-art in practice and future challenges Computer and
Electronics in Agriculture, Elsevier, Vol. 18, pp. 66-84,
Oct 2015.
[5] Konstantinos G. Liakos, Patrizia Busato, Dimitrios
Moshou, Simon Pearson and Dionysis Bochtis. Machine
Learning in Agriculture: A Review. MDPI Journal of Sen-
sors 2018, 18, 2674.
[6] Bauer, A., Bostrom, A.G., Ball, J. et al. Combining
computer vision and deep learning to enable ultra-scale
aerial phenotyping and precision agriculture: A case
study of lettuce production. Hortic Res 6, 70 (2019)
doi:10.1038/s41438-019-0151-5