Indian-origin High School Students Create Farming App ‘AgriCultured’
High school seniors Unnathi Kumar, Aarushi Bansal and Tarana Tewari have teamed up to create the AgriCultured app. (photo provided)
India-West Staff Reporter
Indian-origin high schoolers Unnathi Kumar, Aarushi Bansal and Tarana Tewari have teamed up to create an app aimed at making farming life more efficient.
The three 16-year-old high school seniors – Kumar and Bansal from Pathways World School in Aravali; Tewari of the Etobicoke School of Arts in Canada – created AgriCultured, an app aiming to make farming practices more efficient and sustainable in India.
By encompassing crop management and detection tools, AgriCultured aims to build a community of sustainable farmers with responsible consumption and production practices, a news release said.
In India, the agriculture sector is the primary source of livelihood for about 58% of India’s population and accounts for about 15 percent of the national GDP. Yet farming practices continue to be a major pollution emitter due to crop burning being a cost-effective method to eliminate crop waste.
AgriCultured includes AI-powered plant disease detection through image recognition, localized weather-based suggestions, scientific farming calculators, reminders, and farming forums, the release explains.
Thus, AgriCultured aims to build a community of sustainable farmers with responsible consumption and production practices. More importantly, AgriCultured aims to build local community networks of sustainable farmers in India, through environmentally-friendly farming practices and the use of minimal resources facilitated by the app, it said.
“Our first exposure to the agricultural sector came through our school,” Kumar said in an email to India-West. “On our way to school, for years, we came across acres of productive farming lands and viewed the day-to-day activities of the farming community from a distant lens. Also, we live in Delhi NCR, where crop burning deteriorates the air quality significantly during the winters. Both of these experiences coupled together inspired our team of three to work on an enterprise that assists the farming community and helps combat the problem of crop burning,” Kumar added.
Recently, AgriCultured won the climate award at Technovation Challenge 2021, one of the biggest international entrepreneurship and tech competitions for young women, with over 1,700 startup submissions from over 60 countries.
The Technovation Challenge requires its participants to develop a fully-functioning Android app, create a business plan and demo, and pitch videos. As part of the climate award, AgriCultured – the only team from India to win an award – was awarded a cumulative educational stipend of $1,500.
Kumar said the prize received from Technovation “will further give us an opportunity to expand our enterprise and thus bring us closer to achieving our goal of encouraging sustainable farming throughout India.”
AgriCultured is aimed at the Indian farming community, with a special focus on individual and small-scale farmers who can use our product to farm more efficiently.
AgriCultured’s minimum viable product is available on the Google Play Store for public consumption. They are also in the process of testing and launching the app commercially.
“In the future, we would like to commercially launch the app and expand its reach in the farming community, creating a bigger impact,” Kumar envisioned. “We also plan on launching future versions of the app with regional language support and support for detecting a greater number of plant diseases.”
