Project MechaCrop: Technology for Sustainable Farming
MechaCrop is a technology-driven initiative aimed at helping Indian farmers with solutions for detecting and addressing crop diseases, performing soil quality assessment, and help reducing emissions. Combining this purpose of making a social impact, with his passion
for technology, MechaCrop was incubated by Aryan Rajvanshi, a student of Grade 11 in IGCSE, Anand Niketan in 2022.
Through over 20 farm visits and ~50 interviews of farmers across Gujarat, Aryan understood the challenges of manual, tedious and unreliable crop and soil protection methods resulting in 25% crop losses at the farms, reduced income, thus putting the farmers
under economic and emotional trauma.
Leveraging his robust understanding in Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, and experience gained in drones through internships, Aryan designed image classification algorithm and trained it with more than 20000 images for apple black rot, grape black rot, corn common rust and strawberry leaf scorch diseases. It will facilitate identifying these diseases in the crops
through image analytics sensors deployed in the drones.
MechaCrop got selected as a project of social importance by Sutardja Centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) at University of California, Berkeley. A proud moment for Anand Niketan Satellite, Aryan represented the school in San Francisco, California in April 2023 and pitched his research project to several professors, founders, and students at UCB. The engagement was insightful and the feedback was invaluable for Aryan to strengthen his initiative. Of all the pitches done, Aryan topped
amongst his peers and has been invited to the United Nations (UN) to present his initiative. Kudos to him for this acknowledgement making us all proud.
Farmers are the backbone of the Indian society and a transformation is required to enhance their quality of life and income levels. It is important that ANTS support this noble initiative and help in making our country a better place for all.