IIT Roorkee Students Develop Cost-Effective Soil Testing Solutions

Anisha Godha, Utkarsh Seth Saxena, Ankit Bagaria and Ekdeep Lubana, third-year B.Tech students of Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) have developed affordable soil testing solutions that can be used by farmers to amplify crop productivity through the sustainable use of fertilisers. For this purpose, the students have come up with a device called ‘Solving Nitrogen Application Problems (SNAP)’ to reduce the ineffective use of fertilisers that leads to minimal crop yield.

SNAP is an optical imaging application which can determine the flawless fertiliser input by multi-spectral imaging of crop leaves. The device developed by the students is a programmed camera module which is used to click the image of leaves and govern the nitrogen content in the soil.

Also Read: - IIT Kharagpur Develops Solutions to Control Hacking in IoT Devices

Ekdeep Lubana, who led the project, pointed that lack of awareness among the rural farmers has been forcing them to believe that insufficient usage of fertilisers would be the major reason for the low yield. ‘SNAP’ tries to bring the power of ‘Smart Soil Analysis’ to the farmers, he added.

He further mentioned that the main objective of the project is to offer farmers with an easy and low-cost solution to determine the quantity of fertiliser that must be used during the cultivation. The application (SNAP) will guide farmers in an easy manner on the quantity of fertiliser to be used based on the analysis of leaves, he concluded.

Also Read: - Researchers at University of Hyderabad (UoH) Develop Transgenic Rice

Project ‘SNAP’ listed among 900 teams from more than 70 countries across the globe emerged as the winner of the Ericson Innovation Awards for the year 2017. The team was awarded 25,000 Euros for this award.