Nirwal (2026) Empowering the Drylands: An AI-Driven Framework for Precision Agriculture and Sustainable Rural Development in the Marathwada Region

⚠️ Warning: This summary was generated from the abstract only, as the full text was not available.

Identification

• Journal: Open MIND
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-07-28
• Authors: Bharat Trimbakrao Nirwal
• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21638567

Research Groups

Not specified

Short Summary

The paper proposes an AI-Enabled Rural Development Framework (AI-RDF) for the Marathwada region of India to combat water scarcity and agricultural distress through IoT-integrated machine learning.

Objective

• To develop a low-cost, localized AI framework to optimize precision irrigation, enable early pest and disease detection, and provide market-demand forecasting for smallholder farmers in semi-arid regions.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Marathwada region, Maharashtra, India (specifically Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, Beed, and Jalna districts).
• Temporal Scale: Not explicitly stated; utilizes historical weather parameters for predictive modeling.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for predictive evapotranspiration; hybrid cloud-edge Machine Learning (ML) models.
• Data sources: Simulated regional soil-moisture datasets and historical weather parameters.

Main Results

• Reduction of agricultural water expenditure by 34%.
• Optimization of crop yields by 18%.

Contributions

• Development of a localized AI-RDF specifically engineered for dryland ecosystems.
• Provision of a socio-technical deployment roadmap designed to overcome digital literacy barriers in rural developing economies.

Funding

Not specified

Citation

@article{Nirwal2026Empowering,
  author = {Nirwal, Bharat Trimbakrao},
  title = {Empowering the Drylands: An AI-Driven Framework for Precision Agriculture and Sustainable Rural Development in the Marathwada Region},
  journal = {Open MIND},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21638567},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21638567}
}