Smart Water Management Framework for Irrigation in Agriculture

Global demand and pressure on natural resources is increasing, which is greater on the availability of pure and safe drinking water. The use of new-age technologies including Smart sensors, embedded devices, and Cloud computing can help deliver efficient and safe management for provisioning drinking water for consumers and irrigation for agriculture. The management actions combined with real-time data gathering, monitoring, and alerting with proactive actions, prevent issues from occurring. This research presents a secure and smart research framework to enhance the existing irrigation system. This involves a low-budget irrigation model that can provide automated control and requirements as per the season, climate by using smart device sensors and Cloud communications. The authors presented four unique algorithms and water management processing rules. This also includes alerting scenarios for device and component failures and water leakage by automatically switching to alternative mode and sending alert messages about the faults to resolve the operational failures.The objective of this research is to identify new-age technologies for providing efficient and effective farming methods and investigate Smart IoT-based water management. The highlights of this research are to investigate IoT water management systems using algorithms for irrigation farming, for which this research presents a secure and smart research framework. This involves a low-budget irrigation model that provides automated control and requirements as per the season, climate by using smart device sensors and Cloud communications. Alerts for device and component failures and water leakage are also in-built for switching to alternative mode to resolve the operational failures

Conservation Agriculture: Climate Proof and Nature Positive Approach

The development pathways of countries and regions have impacted land-climate interactions and shaped challenges, opportunities and actions. Adverse impacts of climate change increasingly threaten livelihoods and resilience of people around the globe, food security and the stability of environmental resources. Globally, the current food systems are not fit for purpose. Land-based options such as Conservation Agriculture (CA) were found to mitigate climate change, regenerate soils and ensure durable food systems. Achieving sustained results using CA systems, under climate change and social pressures, while maximizing co-benefits related to food and nutrient security, social and biological diversity, ecosystem restoration and services and sustainable development, requires appropriate country-specific policies and significant investment. CA implementation is challenging and context specific and necessitates an integrated framework and road map to enable deeper ambitions for social equity and development and inclusive economic growth

Do phone-based short message services improve the uptake of agri-met advice by farmers? A case study in Haryana, India

Phone-based short message applications (also called SMS in common parlance) as a medium of sending agricultural information to farmers is considered important in the context of a developing country as it makes information accessible to a large number of farmers economically. However, the empirical evidence on the effect of agricultural information sent through SMS on varied farm outcomes is divided. Using a randomized control trial study design, the present study focuses on a particular agricultural information viz. agri-met advisories, and a particular channel of dissemination viz. SMS to understand the role of information and the medium of information in compliance with recommended information and improvement in farm outcomes. This paper asks two main questions: i) does provision of agri-met advisory via SMS lead to greater compliance with advisory recommendations by the farmers? and ii) Do farm outcomes such as yield differ for those who received the agri-met advisory via SMS?The study is based on six districts in Haryana divided across three agro-climatic zones focusing on the wheat crop. The results showed positive and significant impact of SMS agri-met advisories on the farmers’ compliance with advisory for the treatment group—particularly when the advisory was about agricultural cycles and processes with which they are familiar. However, for weather-related advisory, the results did not show a significant impact of SMS-based agri-met advice on the farmers’ compliance, which was unexpected. The likely reasons for such a finding could be many—including unfamiliarity of the farmers with acting on weather advice, which suggests that future research is needed on factors affecting the uptake of SMS-based agri-met advice by farmers in developing country context

Validating the rigour of adaptive methods of economic evaluation

Background There has been a lot of debate on how to ‘generalise’ or ‘translate’ findings of economic evaluation (EE) or health technology assessment (HTA) to other country contexts. Researchers have used various adaptive HTA (aHTA) methods like model-adaptation, price-benchmarking, scorecard-approach, etc., for transferring evidence from one country to other. This study was undertaken to assess the degree of accuracy in results generated from aHTA approaches specifically for EE.Methods By applying selected aHTA approaches, we adapted findings of globally published EE to Indian context. The first-step required identifying two interventions for which Indian EE (referred to as the ‘Indian reference study’) has been conducted. The next-step involved identification of globally published EE. The third-step required undertaking quality and transferability check. In the fourth step, outcomes of EE meeting transferability standards, were adapted using selected aHTA approaches. Lastly, adapted results were compared with findings of the Indian reference study.Results The adapted cost estimates varied considerably, while adapted quality-adjusted life-years did not differ much, when matched with the Indian reference study. For intervention I (trastuzumab), adapted absolute costs were 11 and 6 times higher than the costs reported in the Indian reference study for control and intervention arms, respectively. Likewise, adapted incremental cost and incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) were around 3.5–8 times higher than the values reported in the Indian reference study. For intervention II (intensity-modulated radiation therapy), adapted absolute cost was 35% and 12% lower for the comparator and intervention arms, respectively, than the values reported in the Indian reference study. The mean incremental cost and ICER were 2.5 times and 1.5 times higher, respectively, than the Indian reference study values.Conclusion We conclude that findings from aHTA methods should be interpreted with caution. There is a need to develop more robust aHTA approaches for cost adjustment. aHTA may be used for ‘topic prioritisation’ within the overall HTA process, whereby interventions which are highly cost-ineffective, can be directly ruled out, thus saving time and resources for conducting full HTA for interventions that are not well studied or where evidence is inconclusive