OPPORTUNITY OF APPLICATION OF DRONE TECHNOLOGY IN AGRICULTURE-WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO PESTICIDE SPRAYING

Abstract

Agriculture as a traditional livelihood, has passed through the cross road of tradition and modern scientific technology during industrial revolution. New regime of non agricultural workforce evolved. Therefore farmers had to took responsibility to feed huge non agricultural workers as well as to cater different raw materials for industrial production. Newly emerged nation had to adopt policy of input intensive production system. These critical inputs were high yielding variety seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation water. This newly adopted policy is called as green revolution. Though green revolution had broken impasse of poor productivity, but this achievement was not maintained for long run. Factor productivity of different inputs gradually declined due to law of diminishing marginal return. Therefore new innovative intervention is warranted and to be sought to overcome this impasse of nation’s agricultural growth. In 2015 the terms ‘’ Fourth Industrial Revolution ‘’ or ‘’ Agriculture 4.0 `’ were proposed. It is a paradigm shift from chemical led technology to Information Technology led agriculture. This technology is location specific, wastage minimizing, cost reducing and less prone to environmental degradation and known as precision technology. Drone is an unmanned air vehicle and resemble to aero plane/helicopter. Therefore remote operator is safe from any shorts of pesticide contamination and snake bite. Though it was evolved for military purpose , now it can be used for civil purpose and agriculture. This study aims at different aspects of use of drone in agricultural activities. Drone is now a days used as plant protection equipment to spray pesticides in a consolidated fields in different states of India. On the basis of analysis of several empirical studies, different pross and cons of spraying pesticides by drones are enumerated with respect to traditional knapsack sprayer. Standard operating protocols of use of drone are critically studied here.