SL GODARA^l and VN PATHAK²

¹College of Agric., Bikaner; ² Academic Staff College, Raj. Agric. Univ., Bikaner, Rajasthan, India

Background and objectives
India is expanding her fruit export in the changing global market. Compared to the vast production of fruits in India, the fruit export from the country has been negligible. A major constraint has been the enormous losses caused by various diseases of fruits. Management of these diseases would require their correct identification, which has been a difficult problem as the number of experts who can identify these diseases correctly has been ironically very low. Consequently, extension activities to manage these disease have suffered badly and orchardists have not been able to adopt effective measures against these diseases. Scientists earlier believed that experience alone could enable correct identification of these diseases, but we found that this job can be done precisely and speedily with the help of a computer.

For this, we designed a software programme in FoxPro 2.5. The programme is capable of identifying nearly all diseases of various fruits like mango, apple, banana, citrus, avocado, grapes, melons, pineapple, stone fruits, strawberry, raspberry, passion fruit, kiwi fruit, guava, etc. Apart from providing options for symptom choice, the software also provides characters of the causal agents of the diseases. While this software can be used in computer assisted instructions as well as a valuable tool for research, its greater application is for the orchardists who would like to manage these diseases in the orchard and during packing.