Israeli Model farmer field schools in villages soon

BENGALURU: The state government will soon be setting up farmer field schools at every village where they will help farmers in implementing the Israeli model of water usage in farming. The government is looking at implementing the Israeli model of drip irrigation, and has already allocated `300 crore in its budget for the same.

In August 2018, a team from the state government visited Israel to study farming and usage of water by the Israelis.  Manoj Rajan, managing director and CEO, Rashtriya e-Market Services (ReMS) who is heading the committee said after the study, the team will submit recommandations to Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy next week.

Speaking at the ‘’Let There Be Water — Indo-Israel Strategic Water Partnership’’ during Bengaluru Tech Summit, Manoj said that since Israel is 60 per cent desert, it has less water.  For water usage efficiency, they have adopted micro-irrigation method using non conventional sources of water like saline water, adopting rain water harvesting, and treatment of sewage water. “Water is public property there, and it is priced. In Karnataka, we have better rainfall pattern, but are not able to use water like they do,’’ Manoj said.

“We have also recommended constituting village-level farmer field schools across the state. It can be done on a private-public partnership (PPP) model. These schools are nothing but a demonstration platform for farmers to adopt the Israel model of farming, specially drip irrigation that consumes less water,’’ he added.

Smart cities need reboot, say experts

Bengaluru: India’s ambitious Smart City programme, which seeks to develop 100 cities across the country and make them citizen-friendly, needs a reboot, according to experts in the technology field.  In its current avatar, it would not lead to the adoption of technology but would only focus on creating new infrastructure, they said here on Friday. During a panel discussion on India’s digital future, Dattatri Salagame, Head of Digital Business for Robert Bosch Engineering, termed the mission a “pity stop” and hoped that the programme would be overhauled.  “Smart Cities 1.0 is over. I wish it is over,” Salagame said. 

Student exchange on Netherlands’ priority list, says Dutch Ambassador

Bengaluru : The Hague India Cyber Security Summer School course is likely to be held next year at the Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security, which was recently launched in Bengaluru. This announcement was made at the Tech Summit where a delegation of leaders from The Netherlands, including the Dutch Ambassador to India, Marten van den Berg, were present. “Cyber security is extremely relevant in today’s age. For the Netherlands, the exchange of students is also a very important topic and we want to increase such opportunities,” Marten van den Berg said. 

Students from Rajasthan emerge winners in Tech Summit’s Rural IT Quiz

Bengaluru : The Swami Vivekanand Govt Model School, Rajasthan bagged the first place in the Rural IT Quiz organised by Tata Consultancy Services in association with the Department of IT, BT and Science and Technology, Government of Karnataka. The national level finals of the quiz were held in Bengaluru as part of the Bengaluru Tech Summit on Friday. The winners received a trophy along with a TCS educational scholarship of D1,00,000, while the runner-ups received D50,000. The team from JB College of Science, Maharashtra, were the runner-ups. 

Cisco incubates 8 non-profit startups

Bengaluru: N/Core tech is a incubation programme aimed at helping non-profit start-ups leverage technology to solve critical needs like water, healthcare, financial inclusion, and education. This cohort, supported by Cisco CSR, was selected from over 700 applicants. N/Core and Cisco on Friday, hosted a graduation and demo day. In the inaugural cohort of eight start-ups — Involve Education, Alohomora Education, Pi Jam Foundation, Samagra Foundation, Lakeer Foundation, Intelehealth, Aquasafi Rural Development Foundation and Change with One Foundation — worked on building creative, scalable solutions to address problems around critical human needs, education, and economic empowerment.

Hyderabad-based company develops UAV that can help farmers grow healthy plants

Bengaluru: A Hyderabad-based company has developed an advanced Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) which, using sensors, is customised to detect, capture and relay information on the health of individual saplings planted, even on a tiny two sqcm plot, from an altitude of 80 m to a remotely seated farmer or agriculturist. These UAVs are designed to fly for 120 minutes without stopping.

This UAV has been designed to calculate the height of individual saplings, volume of green cover estimation, canopy cover calculation, plant count on a particular piece of land and it can also detect harmful weeds which could threaten crops. The company, Terra Drone India Private Limited, which claims to specialise in developing such UAVs, was one of the participants at the Bengaluru Tech Summit 2018. Marcia Chen from Terra Drone India told TNIE that they have developed the UAV exclusively for agriculture. She said the sensors can also relay a thermal map of the agricultural land, capturing eight sq km in one flight within a duration of 30 minutes at a time.  Explaining another sensor, called LiDAR (or Light Detection and Ranging), Marcia said this can capture the height of the plant. Every plant or sapling should grow to a particular height for a particular duration.