In order to give a digital makeover to a tribal village in Chhattisgarh, a group of faculty members and students are working in IIIT Naya Raipur. In this endeavor recently, IIIT-NR in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur and IIT Kanpur has received a research fund of Rs 2.1 crore from CC&BT R&D division of Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), Government of India. Aptly titled as the TribeConnect, the three-year project aims to make the tribals atmanirbhar (self-dependent) and empowered when it comes to their daily needs of healthcare and agricultural practices. Out of the three institutes, IIIT-NR will play the key role by being the nodal center. The project aims to provide a unified platform for monitoring and sensing, data gathering, inferring, and decision-making for various application domains. The project sees the advanced usage of the Internet of Things & Artificial Intelligence to transform a tribal village in Chhattisgarh to a model smart village as a case study. The main focus is to transform the current tribal village toward a smart full-grown village
“The goal of the project is to transform a current tribal village toward a smart full-grown village using the latest IoT-AI technology. The project focuses on providing a unified platform for monitoring and sensing, data gathering, inferring, and decision-making for various application domains like healthcare, agriculture, education, and village development. The smart pillars of the village will be based on Health and social care, Harvest and Management, and Empowerment & Services. In order to make their life simple, the village will have a health kiosk/ATM, Kisan Assist, and Smart Village Mobile Apps,” said Dr Debanjan Das, Assistant Professor, and Chief Investigator, IIIT –Naya Raipur.
Besides Dr Debanjan, the core team of the project involves Dr Venkanna U, Assistant Professor, and Chief Investigator, IIIT –NR; Dr Rajarshi Mahapatra, Associate Professor, and Co-Investigator, IIIT –NR; Dr Sudip Misra, Professor and Chief Investigator, IIT Kharagpur and Dr Subhas C Misra, Professor and Chief Investigator, IIT Kanpur.
Under the Health and social care, the main objectives are anemia care for pregnant mothers, smart Anganwadi kendras for malnutrition care and telemedicine for primary health medicine and diagnosis. Tribals are being taught with the ways to monitor potable water quality and disaster besides the techniques of smart-farming. They will now sell their products through e-mandis as the communication mediums will be established with the outside world. There will be important on the local promotion of talents.
