Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas
(OSCAR)

Project

Information Technology has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade. The social relevance of such new technologies in developing countries is a widely debated question, both at policy level and also at village level. Needless to say, Free/Open Source movement is creating an indelible impact in the way this new technology develops. FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) also has opened democratic spaces for the participation of civil society, thus creating potential for developing IT&C tools to address problems at local level. In this context, OSCAR is an initiative from European and South Asian Institutions to develop Open Source IT&C solutions to assist decision making on farm-level concerns in agriculture.

The project, which has been co-financed by the European Commission's Asia IT@C Programme, aims at developing an open source application to identify weed species of Rice-Wheat crop systems in Indo-Gangetic Plains. The prototype application will be based on an existing multimedia species identification system, IDAO (IDentification Assiste pour Ordinnateur) will contain around 50 weed species in its database and also will have suggestions about appropriate control measures. It will also be ported in different local languages so as to address the cultural diversity of the project area.

The agencies involved in this project are:

French Institute of Pondicherry, India
CIRAD, France
Rice & Wheat Consortium, India
Wageningen University, The Netherlands