School Labs as facilitating hubs
The secondary schools in the villages could be used as hubs for smart technologies. The children should be trained on certain basic equipment assembling and maintenance as part of education. The science teacher supported by a full-time technician should manage the systems established. Each hub in a village should be networked with a regional hub for services beyond the capacity of the village level hubs.
The local school children and teachers could be trained in flying the drones for identification of the areas affected by various pests. The farmers could plan the harvesting and other management practices based on the observations made from the images obtained from the drone. Solar powered 360 degrees cameras fitted to the Balloon kites (Kytoon / Helikite), and zooming are ideal for continuous monitoring of the resources. At least 4 or 5 such balloon kites could be deployed in a village to cover an extent about 500 to 1000 acres.
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In ClimaAdapt project the author designed and implemented a program with the government school children. Children were involved in pilot demonstration of crop water management. This is activity was initiated so that children would learn about Agriculture practices and technologies.
Close to the schools, paddy fields were selected. The control fields and fields with ‘Alternative Wetting and Drying’ practice were selected.
The children could learn many things through this activity.
1. Awareness on water use efficiency and productivity through water measurement.
2. The conservation of water
3. Rate of water utilization per unit of crop
4. Losses of water in irrigation
5. The canal environment – health of canals, structures and conveyance systems
6. Sensors –
a. These are low cost efficient sensors developedby us at present our sensors cost only Rs. 2000 to Rs. 3000, otherwise in the market they are costing around Rs. 1 lakh each.
b. Development of monitoring kits using sensors
c. Hardware – Arduino micro-controller boards (open source hardware) and
SIM 900 GSM boards. Power options – batteries, solar power, etc.
d. Software – C Language based open software
e. Sensors – Ultrasonic for water level; Temperature and relative humidity
(local weather); soil moisture sensors - The soil moisture sensors helped them in understanding the Irrigation scheduling (or irrigation schedule for crops especially for other than paddy crops).
f. RBC flumes used for measuring the water flows based on water level installed in the unlined field channels.
g. Bowman water tube – A simple tube used for measuring the surface and subsurface water level in the paddy field, which are fitted with ultrasonic sensors.
h. Different adaptation measures in Paddy Cultivation, data collection using sensors.
i. Learning about Climate Change – Adaptation and mitigation.
*Note: The children are able to learn Science of Agriculture, Irrigation systems and methods of irrigation, Physics – through use of sensors and most importantly learning about their our local environment.
Traditionally the school education has not stressed on the importance of educating children to learn from their local environments. Otherwise there is not much scope for children to learn such things in their schools. Agriculture is an important livelihood in rural areas, still there is not much in the syllabus of children. These kinds of hands on experience by children help them to learn from their own environment and also get connected with the livelihoods of their parents. The children would also disseminate their learning’s and impact at least 5 generations.
These children are in turn sharing their experience with the sensors and encouraging their parents to adopt them for water and crop management. In the future their learning would also help the farmers to maintain their equipment installed in their fields with the support their own children ensuring the sustainability. More importantly the cost of the sensors would be the least, as the children themselves would assemble and provide to farmers.
The teachers are also proud that the children are able to learn about their environment and also applied technologies, otherwise they would rarely learn in their life. The children were very much fascinated with the sensors technology and their learning was very quick due to their interest.