*Sujit Chanda
Daughter of the soil, Parmita Ghosh, has been awarded ‘Green Talent 2020 Award’ by the German Government for opening a new horizon in the field of Agri-science. By profession, 25-year old Ghosh is working with Corteva Agri-science of Hyderabad as a Remote Sensing Data Scientist. She hails from Joynagar area under Teliamura. Parmita Ghosh is daughter of a business person, Partha Ghosh and mother Rinku Ghosh, a home maker.
While she is working with Corteva, Parmita Ghosh is also engaged as Young Ambassador of academic section, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) of the German Government.
Her research topic was ‘Developing Agricultural applications from Satellite images using Data Science Technology’. It may be noted, the German Government has awarded 25 researchers of 22 countries including two from India – Parmita Ghosh and Nidhi Singh (32) of Varanasi – out of a total 589 applicants across the globe.
According to sources, Parmita pursued her BTech in Agriengineering from the Central Agriculture University if Sikkim (2017) and MTech in Geoinformatics and Natural Resources from the IIT Bombay (2019). She was awarded the DAAD ‘IIT Master Sandwich Programme 2018’ for pursuing her MTech project work at Technical University of Danmstadt , Germany.
Earlier, Parmita was selected for the “Google Summer of Earth Engine-2019” and collaborated with the ICRISAT, India.
According to the Greentalants website, the second UN Sustainability Development Goal (SDG) is “Zero hunger”. She strongly believes that her research work can contribute to erase hunger by acting as a decision support system for all kinds of farmers and for decision makers likewise. She has adopted machine-learning solutions for satellite images for agricultural applications. During the development of all these applications she has closely worked with interdisciplinary groups like agronomists, statisticians, soil scientists, remote sensing experts, data science experts, commercial agriculture teams, and agricultural engineers.
So far, Parmita has developed applications for crop yield estimation, crop health monitoring, crop phenology mapping, crop classification, crop biomass estimation, and identification of water-saving rice varieties from satellite images. All these applications are crucial digital tools for agricultural monitoring and advisory generation.
The jury was impressed by this passionate scientist working interdisciplinary connecting her knowledge in remote sensing and agricultural engineering to help the world fight food scarcity. (PIC)
*Sujit Chanda may be contacted at sujitchandatlm@gmail.com