The village school in Kothapally, in southern India, has only a handful of amenities – blackboards, desks and chairs, a playground with a wooden bench under a tree. But it has one unusual resource: an automatic weather station. Nestled among farms, the government school is the only one in the southern Indian state of Telangana – and possibly in the country – to have a weather station on its premises, scientists overseeing the station said.
Ninth graders, all children of local farmers, record rainfall, humidity, wind speed and the air temperature as part of a bigger project led by an international crop research institute to customise the village’s farming to its water availability. “I understand how this works. I know if it rains well the previous day it is a good time to put fertilizer on the crops the next day,” said Vamshi Voggu, 14, who doesn’t much like science lessons but enjoys his morning weather-monitoring job at school.
“My parents are farmers. This information helps them,” Voggu told the Thomson Reuters Foundation during a class break, with his giggly friends chiming in on how farmers in the village benefit from the device.
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