Note4students
Mains Paper 3: Agriculture | E-technology in the aid of farmers
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important:
Prelims level: Various initiatives mentioned in the newscard
Mains level: Various technological measures for enhancing farm productivity
News
- The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, has been pro-active in using the space technology in agricultural sector. Take a look of various initiative in the aid of farmers:
Various institutional measures
- The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare established a Centre, called Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre, in 2012.
- It works for operationalization of the space technology developed in the Indian Space Research Organization, for crop production forecasting.
- The Soil and Land Use Survey of India uses satellite data for soil resources mapping.
Use of Space Technology
The Department is using space technology for its various programmes/ areas, such as:
- Forecasting Agricultural Output using Space, Agro-meteorology and Land-based Observations (FASAL) project
- Coordinated programme on Horticulture Assessment and Management using geoiNformatics (CHAMAN) project
- National Agricultural Drought Assessment and Monitoring System (NADAMS),
- Rice-Fallow Area Mapping and intensification, geo tagging of infrastructure and assets created under Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana,
Crop Insurance
- The space technology helps getting fast and unbiased information about the crop situation in the country.
- It provides digital data, which is amenable to various analysis. Because of its synoptic view, it provides images of the whole country in a very short duration.
- Hence, this data can be used for various programmes, which need information on crop type, crop area estimates, crop condition, crop damages, crop growth etc.
KISAN Project
- The Department has launched KISAN [C(K)rop Insurance using Space technology And geoiNformatcs] project during October 2015.
- The project envisaged use of high-resolution remote sensing data for optimum crop cutting experiment planning and improving yield estimation.
- Under this project, pilot studies were conducted in 4 districts of 4 States viz. Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
- The study provided many useful inputs [for smart sampling, yield estimation, optimum number of Crop Cutting Experiments (CCEs) etc.
- These were used to define Standard Operating Procedures for use of satellite data in the revised guidelines of Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna (PMFBY).