Something as ubiquitous as a plant often escapes our attention, just like the air we breathe. We tend to take both for granted. But the plant kingdom is no smaller than the animal world. There is issue, however, for the farmers. As most plants grow well according to the soil and climatic conditions, an ordinary farmer is often clueless as to which species to grow and which to avoid.
To make things easier for the farmers, the Tamil Nadu government had developed a unique app ‘Treepedia’. The brain behind the app, which is essentially an encyclopedia on trees and plants, is IFS officer Sudha Ramen. Currently posted as Deputy Conservator of Forests in Tamil Nadu, Ms. Ramen mentioned that she designed the app with the help of her team members. In a conversation with Indian Masterminds, she talked about how the app was developed and the challenges she faced during its creation.
Bridging the Gap between Lab and Land
`Treepedia’ is an app which helps the farmers to easily choose the species for plantation in their respective areas. . It was developed by Tamil Forest department under Tamil Nadu Innovative initiatives schemes and the proposal was given by Ms. Ramen. However, the story behind the development of the app goes back to the days when she was getting her training in the forest academy.
Before joining the Forest services, Ms Ramen was working with Wipro and she learned forestry only after getting selected as an IFS officer.
As she said, “during my training period, I learned about various species of plants and their benefits if planted in farm forestry model. It was little shocking for me to know that there are lots of information available in books and research papers but not easily accessible to the farmers or common people. I realized that there is a huge gap between lab to land and by minimizing it one can get magical results.’’
Thereafter, Ms Ramen developed a prototype of tree encyclopedia for a project in the academy. Her work was not only appreciated by the faculty and her batch-mates, but several officers from the all over the country also praised the initiative.
When she joined the Tamil Nadu forest department, Ms Ramen got the task to redevelop the app on a large scale. And that’s how `Treepedia’ came into existence.
The challenges
Talking about the challenges that came in her way, Ms Ramen said, “data collection was the biggest challenge. We could not just rely on the books because sometime the experience of a farmer is different than what is in the book. So, a team worked with a farmers associations, forestry institutes and retired forest officers to gather the required information. Then language was also a barrier because some information was available in Tamil language while some only in English. To translate all of them in both the languages was a big task”.
The app contains information about 150-plus species that can be planted in the state. Farmer could feed the factors like the soil type, climatic condition and get all the information like which and what size of plant to pick up for their land. It also has details like the size of the pit and the gap between two saplings. The app contains further details about the diseases that the plant could get and how to treat these, as also information about which plants to pick for inter-crop farming.
Offline working facility
The best part about the app is that it could also work offline. Ms. Ramen held as they were developing the app for the farmers, it was not possible for them to have high-speed internet at all times. So, it has automatic download facility. If a farmer search about certain species, all the information gets downloaded in the background which can be used anytime.
With her innovation, Ms. Ramen has helped lakhs of farmers and there earnings has increased. However, this is just a single feather in her cap. We will soon talk about her other achievements as well.
