Manipur startup helping tea industry with latest technologies.

Tea garden managers can remotely monitor conditions in their estate without having themselves to be present.

A startup from Manipur, Nibiaa which is working on bringing latest technologies to the tea industry has built dashboards which will help garden managers access data from anywhere across the globe and remotely monitor conditions in the Tea Garden.

"These data collections were important to calculate data points in digital format for analysis reporting and carbon credit calculation" Aeroshil Nameirakpam Co-Founder of Nibiaa told Business Northeast.

The client is one of the largest tea manufacturing unit in the region and also with global presence.

Trials and pilot project installation of LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) based environmental devices were done in 3 Tea Estates in North East.  Some of the data collected during the trial are:

1.            CO2, Temperature and Humidity Sensor

2.            Soil Moisture, Temperature and EC Sensor

3.            Light Intensity Sensor

4.            Optical Rain Gauge Sensor 

"We hope to bring benefits to tea gardens in the long term like help certify carbon credit generation, better supply chain visibility with IoT sensors and Blockchain traceability,  improve data-driven decisions and optimize the use of resources for regenerative agriculture to add a revenue stream to farmers and tea planters faster, cheaper and greener" he said.

He said Nibiaa company got interested working in tea because of our Co-Founder Prof. N. Irabanta Singh, who has more than 42 years of agricultural research experience and his colleagues Prof. B.K Dutta(Former Scientist Toklai Exp. Station(TTRI) and Current advisory member NEC) and Dr. S. Debnath ( Former Sr. Microbiologist,TTRI Toklai).

"It is sad to see that the current tea industry in the country has been very late in adopting any new technology and still follows the same processes have been followed which have been there for even 100 of years.

"It's high time that technology adoption is encouraged in the tea industry which will help increase yield and bring more high quality tea production.

He said as per our research, various attempts were made earlier to bring Internet of Things (IoT)based technology into the tea industry but there were constrains of Network protocol used, low cellular coverage in interior regions where the tea is mostly grown, because of which reliable solutions weren’t widely adopted.

Nibiaa is incubated out of Sikkim Manipal University Technology Business Incubator (SMU-TBI), Sikkim and Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology – Technology Business Incubator (KIIT-TBI), Orissa. The Startup has also received grants like the prestigious Biotechnology Ignition Grant ( BIRAC- BIG) from DBT and Startup India Seed Funds(SISF) from Startup India Scheme to develop its noble solutions.  

"With the new LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) we are using, we are able to provide reliable connectivity even without cellular coverage to the most interiors regions of the tea garden. Furthermore, the sensor devices we are using lasts for 2-5 years battery life, weather proof industrial grade and highly reliable technology. The technology is also relatively new hence, wide scale adoption in tea industry is not yet done" he said.

He said the tea industry as a whole is facing a lot of challenges due to climate change, mounting costs of input, usage of traditional agricultural practices, and unscrupulous usage of pesticides and fertilizers. These resulted in the reduction of tea quality thereby rejection during global export due to traces of such unwanted chemicals hampering potential export revenue generation.

With global industries going towards green and even in the tea industry, there is a high need for regenerative farming practices and modernization of the whole industry towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

"The tea industry is a high carbon sequestration industry. Tea Planters are not utilizing the benefits of Carbon Credits which they can earn if collection, reporting of data from the ground and validation is done correctly" he said.

Nibiaa is working on three major objectives, remote tea garden monitoring using IoT solutions, proper data tracking and reporting for data-driven decision making, and carbon accounting and carbon credit calculations by collecting raw data through IoT Sensors.

The company has partnership with Helium Network which is the world’s largest Blockchain Based LoRaWAN Network Provider. "They have given us Grant funding to help support our business idea. We have also partnered with one of the Largest LoRaWAN Device Manufacturing Company - SeeedStudio to bring about the latest hardware devices for tea industry apart from developing our own in-house hardware devices specifically designed for the tea Industry" he said.

He said the company can carry out field trials in all the tea gardens in Assam. "We are running a pilot project right now in Assam and North Bengal Tea Gardens to collect these sensor data and provide relevant information about the conditions in the garden to the garden manager and people sitting in Headquarters" he disclosed.

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