IIT-KGP team develops technology to improve efficiency in fertiliser application

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have developed a soil-mapping technology to bring efficiency in the use of fertilisers in farmland, a statement issued by the institute said.

The country's food security programme largely relies on soil health and aims at increasing productivity and keeping inorganic components in check, it said.

The differential global positioning system-enabled technology will facilitate cultivators to use nitrogen, phosphorus and potash (NPK) efficiently for automated soil nutrition management, the statement said.

This technology would be able to reduce 30 per cent of fertilisers used in manual methods, IIT Kharagpur director professor V K Tewari said.

He, along with his former research scholar Sneha Jha from the Department of Agricultural and Food Engineering explored a method of creating a soil nutrition map that can be accessed in real-time through a differential global positioning system for variable application of NPK fertilisers, the institute said on Wednesday.

"We divided one hectare of land into 36 grids with the nutritional requirement of each grid fed in the soil map. The fertiliser applicator vehicle, fitted with a DGPS module and graphic user interface-enabled microprocessor cum microcontroller can access this map and compute in real-time the variable rates in the fertiliser application," Tewari said.

The professor also said the innovation will ensure substantial savings in resource applications.