Krishi Mitra: A Multilingual AI-Powered Conversational Agent for Indian Farmers Integrating Government Schemes, Real-Time Mandi Prices, Crop Disease Detection, and Agricultural Advisories.

Abstract: Agriculture remains the backbone of India's economy, employing approximately 55% of the total workforce. Yet the majority of Indian farmers – particularly those in rural areas – continue to face significant challenges in accessing timely, accurate, and language-appropriate information about government welfare schemes, crop insurance policies, real- time market prices, and crop disease management. Existing digital solutions are fragmented, language-exclusive (primarily English or Hindi), and fail to deliver the holistic advisory support that smallholder farmers require. This paper presents Krishi Mitra ("Farmer's Friend"), a multilingual, AI-powered conversational chatbot designed specifically to bridge this information gap. The system integrates a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline using ChromaDB as a vector store and the paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 sentence-transformer model for semantic embedding. Natural language responses are generated using the Llama-3.3-70b-versatile model served through the Groq API. The chatbot supports three languages – English, Hindi, and Marathi – with automatic language detection and cross-lingual translation performed via LLM prompting. Additionally, the system incorporates a real-time mandi (agricultural market) price retrieval module fetching live data from government portals, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based crop disease prediction sub-system using leaf image classification, and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) module powered by Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS) for audio accessibility. Deployed as a Flask REST API with a React.js frontend, the system was evaluated across multiple agricultural query categories, demonstrating high semantic relevance, language fidelity, and user accessibility.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Chatbot, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Multilingual NLP, Indian Agriculture, Farmer Advisory, ChromaDB, Crop Disease Detection, Mandi Prices, Sentence Transformers, Groq, LLM.