Shreya Kulkarni and Rohan Bhide met in a college robotics club and kept tinkering long after graduation. Their latest project is a sensor the size of a pen, powered by a coin cell, that does one thing: it tells a farmer when the soil at root depth is actually dry.
"Most farmers irrigate by calendar or by looking at the topsoil," Shreya explains. "The top two inches dry fast. The roots are often still fine."
Deliberately simple
There is no app and no dashboard. When moisture drops below a threshold set for the crop, the farmer gets one SMS in Marathi. The device costs ₹900 to make and runs for a full season on its battery.
In a pilot across 120 farms near Baramati, growers using the sensor pumped about 30 percent less water with no drop in yield. Electricity bills fell too, a detail farmers mentioned far more often than water.
We kept removing features until it was something a busy farmer would never have to think about.
The pair have open-sourced the hardware design and are working with two farmer producer organisations to manufacture the next 5,000 units locally.
