Organisation:
SENSE IT OUT INTELLIGENT SOLUTIONS PVT LTD
Location:
Pune, Maharashtra
Problem:
1. Irregular watering: Watering once in 7-15 days leaves farms with sometimes flood & sometimes drought-like conditions, leading to reduced yield.
2. Water Wastage: The irrigation beyond soil saturates with maximum water holding capacity, all is a waste. Daily, at least 1 lakh litres of water is wasted per acre of farm.
Problem:
1. Drip Irrigation & Timer-based Automation: Decision making is based on farmer’s intervention. Thus, water wastage & irregular irrigation both exist in these solutions.
2. Sensor-based Automation: Reliable solutions are unaffordable & Affordable solutions are unreliable. Irregular electricity availability affects the system operations.
Majorly the product is designed to cater to farmers of the developing economy predominantly the small & mid-size farmers.
Solution:
SICCA (Sensor-based Intelligent Crop Centric Automation):
It is an IoT based irrigation management system which controls the pumps & valves on a drip irrigated field based on the requirement of the crops in the farm. This crop-centric system saves 60-80% of water as it takes intelligent decisions based on the soil moisture availability at white-root zone of the crop even if the white root zone varies at different crop stages. It also caters to the irregular electricity availability problem at the farm as the system can predict the next irrigation requirement with the help of an intelligent sensor to measure rate of soil evapotranspiration.
The system is capable of collecting data about soil Moisture, soil temperature, atmospheric temperature, humidity, sunlight, number of hours the pump is on and current water consumption of the farm.
Scalability and Impact:
File patent for Soil Evapotranspiration sensor
Next 1 year: 40 paid pilots on different crops & locations across 3 districts of Maharashtra
2nd Year: Sales commercially launch on 1st October 2020. Thereon launch in each of the three districts of Maharashtra every quarter.
3rd Year: Launch product in Punjab – one district at a time every quarter in addition to launching in a new district of Maharashtra every quarter.
By the end of Year 3, expect to have sales of about 2500 products.
Financial Requirements:
NA
Awards and Recognition:
1. Grant Awardee – DBT’s Biotechnology Ignition Grant (BIG) by BIRAC – Mar. ’19
2. Grant Awardee – DST’s Nidhi Prayas grant by NCL Venture Center – Aug. ’17
3. Top-50 – SmartFifty Startups to Transform India by IIM Calcutta Innovation Part & NDTV – Mar. ’18
4. 1st Runner-up – IoT Hackathon – IBM Watson Cognitive IoT Build Hackathon May ’17