New Delhi: A hyper-local weather forecasting station for farmers, a multilingual chat engine for readily available agricultural advice, and a ‘digital twin’ application for crops—these are some of the innovations on display at IIT Ropar’s pavilion at the ongoing AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
The lead institute under the Union Ministry of Education’s “Make AI in India, Make AI Work for India” initiative, Punjab’s IIT Ropar, has the specific mandate to advance artificial intelligence and technology research, specially curated toward agriculture. In the farming-heavy state of Punjab, which contributes more than 10 per cent of the entire country’s rice production, this mandate is also timely.
“We’re seeing an increasing trend of our youth not wanting to enter farming, even though we are an agri-focused country,” said Professor Rajeev Ahuja, Director, IIT Ropar, to ThePrint. “Tech and AI are the future, and by making agriculture more tech-savvy, we can also engage the youth in this sector. They can use AI solutions to increase productivity in their farms.”
An exhibitor from Annam.ai, the agricultural-focused AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) at IIT Ropar, explained to a group of visitors how they have deployed more than 4,000 of their indigenously built AI-based weather stations across the country.
“The AWS weather station can give weather data at a very hyper-local level, which is the need of farmers across the country—they want to know when rain will arrive, how much, what the humidity is in the air,” said Divya Monga, Innovation Program Manager, Annam.ai. “Our stations have IoT sensors and AI-based predictive capabilities and have been verified by IITM Pune, proven to have over 90 per cent accuracy.”
Monga also explained how the AWS Weather Stations have multiple use cases, and even companies like Zomato and Blinkit have bought it for easier delivery services.
Annam.ai was established in January 2025 as one of the three main AI Centres of Excellence under a Rs 990 crore grant by the Union Ministry of Education. Apart from IIT Ropar, there were two other centres announced—one focused on Healthcare under AIIMS and IIT Delhi, and the other on Sustainable Cities in IIT Kanpur.
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Bringing AI to the ground
While Annam.ai is the face of AI in agricultural innovation at IIT Ropar, the university is also engaged in other AI-focused interventions, such as a BTech programme in Digital Agriculture that began in 2025.
“We initially opened 20 seats for this four-year degree programme, and they’re all filled. There’s definitely interest from the students to study digital and AI applications in agriculture,” explained Ahuja. “And we’re not just teaching, we’re showing practical applications through our CoE and its projects.”
He pointed to other Annam.AI projects like the multilingual AI chat engine for farmer support, which works like ChatGPT but specifically for farmers. It is an accessible chatbot developed by IIT Ropar scientists which can provide farmers with real-time advice on farming techniques, soil testing, weather, and even market prices.
“We have trained our language model on existing data provided by experts, but we didn’t stop there. The chatbot is also linked with an agri call centre, where farmers can connect to experts speaking their language and ask questions,” said Monga.
While most of their projects are still being developed, IIT Ropar is working diligently with the Punjab government and farmer-producer organisations (FPOs) across Punjab to test and validate their models. The institute also has agri-tech hubs in states like Uttar Pradesh, and MoUs with Tamil Nadu and Haryana, as well as organisations like the ICAR-Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal.
Their goal, explained Ahuja, is to ensure AI is integrated at every stage of the agricultural process in the country.
“If there is any country that can lead the world in AI applications, not just in agriculture but other fields too, it is. We have the skills—you can see it,” he said, gesturing to his pavilion. “We have the manpower. Most importantly, we have the vision.”
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)