Peasants relying on information technology to plan their farm practices can now turn to a software, which promises to help them identify and destroy weeds.
Christened OSCAR, the software is part of a project aimed at assisting farmers in identifying and eliminating unwanted plants from their land.
"The project builds an open source weed identification system for major weed species for rice-wheat cropping systems of Indo-Gangetic plains covering India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh," Rice-Wheat Consortium for Indo-Gangetic Plains head Raj K Gupta said, after the software was unveiled.
"The project aims at making technology accessible in remote areas," director of National Agriculture Innovation Project Mruthyunjaya said.
Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas (OSCAR) is a collaborative effort, inititated by the French Institute of Pondicherry with Rice-Wheat Consortium for Indo-Gangetic Plains, India, CIRAD of France, Netherlands-based Wageningen University.
The software has varied illustrations for precise results. The user can get all the information on a particular weed and a set of instructions on how to eliminate it. The information can be accessed in three languages Hindi, English and Bengali.
Currently, the software has a database of 50 different weed species found in the Indo-Gangetic plain and would be updated with 250 more varieties of such unwanted plants found in the region.
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