A Comprehensive Study on Smart Agriculture Applications in India

The rampant adoption of digital technologies made momentous changes in all economic sectors. The agriculture sector cannot abstain from the digital revolution. Agriculture and farming are one of the oldest and most important professions in India. The sector remains the backbone of the Indian rural economy, which desperately demands technological impetus for the socio-economic development of rural areas. Smart agriculture is a revolution in the agriculture industry which helps to guide the actions that are required to modify and reorient the agricultural systems. The paper made an extensive survey of various technologies proposed for the agriculture sector. We have surveyed various smart agricultural applications developed and proposed a taxonomy for classifying them. Network infrastructure and connectivity remains the major challenge for rural areas. The paper explores the viability of deploying IoT-based technologies in agricultural sectors along machine learning techniques to optimize resource utilization, planning and cultivation, marketing, pesticide selection, price prediction, etc. An in-depth coverage of recent research works is also mentioned which will help the future researchers to address specific challenge and adopt suitable technology to help the farmers to improve their productivity and better decision making in cultivation. Apart from listing the applications, we also propose an architecture for smart agriculture and implemented smart price prediction model for crops like cotton and cardamom along with a prototype for smart irrigation.