Wadhwani AI, a non-profit organisation founded by Indian-American tech entrepreneurs Romesh and Sunil Wadhwani, has been able to help cotton farmers reduce the use of pesticides by 20 per cent through its National Pest Surveillance System (NPSS).
JP Tripathi, Director of Agriculture Programs at Wadhwani AI, told businessline that the not-for-profit organisation has built other solutions such as chatbox, computer vision for other crops, grain analyser for soyabean and to convert data collection from text to voice and vice-versa, to directly help small farmers or an eco-system that will eventually aid them.
NPSS began with its solution CottonAce, which focused on the two major pests – American and Pink Bollworm – in cotton. An artificial intelligence (AI) driven system, NPSS is now being extended to paddy, maize and chillies. “We have created 40-plus pest and disease models for four crops, including cotton. Barring cotton, the solutions are still in a pilot mode,” he said.
On CottonAce, he said the organisation’s solution got deployed with almost 21,000 farmers in 2-3 years across the 11 cotton-growing States.
“We evaluated our success and realised that there was a 10-11 per cent increase in production, besides a reduction in the use of pesticides,” said Tripathi.
Wadhwani AI, which specialises in AI research and was launched in 2018, realised that it could reach out to small farmers growing cotton. “We approached the Agriculture Ministry to help us get the solution adopted by farmers in 2022. The Ministry showed keen interest but suggested that we work on more crops and pests to derive a few more combinations,” he said.
Wadhwani then began to create solutions for other crops simultaneously. It was here that the NPSS evolved. The organisation found that neither the Ministry nor the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) bodies had the data required for creating more AI models. It then created a system for the data collection process, which resulted in data coming in during 2023 and 2024.
In addition, Plantix, an app for crop diagnosis, offered its 400-plus pest and disease models. However, the company had created models only to identify and provide advice, but it doesn’t look into the intensity of the pest attack and its impact on the crop.
“Luckily, what we did with cotton was we specifically designed it scientifically from the perspective of pest attack intensity.
So our CottonAce model has been integrated with all the plant models that are currently integrated into NPSS, which the ministry is rolling out across States,” said the Wadhwani AI official.
Asked about the continuing menace of pink bollworm in cotton, Tripathi said the pest lays its eggs near the boll. After the egg is hatched, the larva enters the boll and eats the whole boll from inside. By the time the larva comes out, the entire boll is destroyed.
“The farmer gets to know about the pest attack only when he sees the hole in the boll. After that, any pesticide spraying is of no use. The adult has to be caught and the mating has to be stopped,” he said.
This is where Wadhwani has come up with its AI model of the pheromone trap in which the pink bollworms are trapped. The model can differentiate between the pink bollworm and other pests or worms and measure the intensity of the bollworm attack on the plant.
“Accordingly, it provides advice to the farmer,” Tripathi said, adding that chemical and physical efforts are needed to tackle the pink bollworm, while agronomic practices need to be changed.
Wadhwani AI now manages the Kisan e-Mitra AI Chatbot for the Agriculture Ministry. It helps farmers to get more details on government schemes such as PM-KISAN, Fasal Bhima Yojana, Kisan Credit Card and soil health card.
The service is available across all 36 States and Union Territories, handling over 10,000 queries daily and offering instant responses related to payments, registration, and eligibility. The organisation’s AI-enabled support system is helping streamline access to vital government benefits and reduce long-standing bottlenecks.
Tripathi said farmers had a lot of queries on the PM Kisan scheme, including how to enrol, besides over 40 queries when they were asked to get in touch with a particular cell for a specific programme. Since the project implementation team had limited bandwidth, it could not respond to all queries. Then, the Agriculture Ministry came up with the bot idea to respond based on the guidelines for the projects.
“We started with around 3 lakh unanswered queries for over two-and-a-half months. Understanding the context, we created Kisan e-Mitra. And this particular solution had responded to nearly 2.97 million queries in a year,” he said. After this, the Ministry added a few more such as Fasal Bhima, Kisan Credit and soil health cards.
On how AI is transforming agriculture, Tripathi said there are two dimensions to it. One if whether whatever is being created is useful. The second is “creating something trustworthy”. Once these “barriers” are crossed, it becomes easy to encourage farmers to adopt AI-driven solutions.
Published on May 28, 2025
Wadhwani AI, a non-profit organisation founded by Indian-American tech entrepreneurs Romesh and Sunil Wadhwani, has been able to help cotton farmers reduce the use of pesticides by 20 per cent through its National Pest Surveillance System (NPSS).
JP Tripathi, Director of Agriculture Programs at Wadhwani AI, told businessline that the not-for-profit organisation has built other solutions such as chatbox, computer vision for other crops, grain analyser for soyabean and to convert data collection from text to voice and vice-versa, to directly help small farmers or an eco-system that will eventually aid them.
NPSS began with its solution CottonAce, which focused on the two major pests – American and Pink Bollworm – in cotton. An artificial intelligence (AI) driven system, NPSS is now being extended to paddy, maize and chillies. “We have created 40-plus pest and disease models for four crops, including cotton. Barring cotton, the solutions are still in a pilot mode,” he said.
On CottonAce, he said the organisation’s solution got deployed with almost 21,000 farmers in 2-3 years across the 11 cotton-growing States.
“We evaluated our success and realised that there was a 10-11 per cent increase in production, besides a reduction in the use of pesticides,” said Tripathi.
Wadhwani AI, which specialises in AI research and was launched in 2018, realised that it could reach out to small farmers growing cotton. “We approached the Agriculture Ministry to help us get the solution adopted by farmers in 2022. The Ministry showed keen interest but suggested that we work on more crops and pests to derive a few more combinations,” he said.
Wadhwani then began to create solutions for other crops simultaneously. It was here that the NPSS evolved. The organisation found that neither the Ministry nor the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) bodies had the data required for creating more AI models. It then created a system for the data collection process, which resulted in data coming in during 2023 and 2024.
In addition, Plantix, an app for crop diagnosis, offered its 400-plus pest and disease models. However, the company had created models only to identify and provide advice, but it doesn’t look into the intensity of the pest attack and its impact on the crop.
“Luckily, what we did with cotton was we specifically designed it scientifically from the perspective of pest attack intensity.
So our CottonAce model has been integrated with all the plant models that are currently integrated into NPSS, which the ministry is rolling out across States,” said the Wadhwani AI official.
Asked about the continuing menace of pink bollworm in cotton, Tripathi said the pest lays its eggs near the boll. After the egg is hatched, the larva enters the boll and eats the whole boll from inside. By the time the larva comes out, the entire boll is destroyed.
“The farmer gets to know about the pest attack only when he sees the hole in the boll. After that, any pesticide spraying is of no use. The adult has to be caught and the mating has to be stopped,” he said.
This is where Wadhwani has come up with its AI model of the pheromone trap in which the pink bollworms are trapped. The model can differentiate between the pink bollworm and other pests or worms and measure the intensity of the bollworm attack on the plant.
“Accordingly, it provides advice to the farmer,” Tripathi said, adding that chemical and physical efforts are needed to tackle the pink bollworm, while agronomic practices need to be changed.
Wadhwani AI now manages the Kisan e-Mitra AI Chatbot for the Agriculture Ministry. It helps farmers to get more details on government schemes such as PM-KISAN, Fasal Bhima Yojana, Kisan Credit Card and soil health card.
The service is available across all 36 States and Union Territories, handling over 10,000 queries daily and offering instant responses related to payments, registration, and eligibility. The organisation’s AI-enabled support system is helping streamline access to vital government benefits and reduce long-standing bottlenecks.
Tripathi said farmers had a lot of queries on the PM Kisan scheme, including how to enrol, besides over 40 queries when they were asked to get in touch with a particular cell for a specific programme. Since the project implementation team had limited bandwidth, it could not respond to all queries. Then, the Agriculture Ministry came up with the bot idea to respond based on the guidelines for the projects.
“We started with around 3 lakh unanswered queries for over two-and-a-half months. Understanding the context, we created Kisan e-Mitra. And this particular solution had responded to nearly 2.97 million queries in a year,” he said. After this, the Ministry added a few more such as Fasal Bhima, Kisan Credit and soil health cards.
On how AI is transforming agriculture, Tripathi said there are two dimensions to it. One if whether whatever is being created is useful. The second is “creating something trustworthy”. Once these “barriers” are crossed, it becomes easy to encourage farmers to adopt AI-driven solutions.
Published on May 28, 2025
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The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
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