Technology for Monitoring Crop Health

The farming community is one of the most vulnerable groups in the country. A whole season’s effort can be put in jeopardy due to inclement weather conditions. In order to provide assistance to the farming community timely intervention is necessary. This can be possible only if information is available.

The Department of Science & Technology has now developed the capability to monitor crop health in real time. Revealing this to the media in a Press Conference today Shri Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences said that this has been developed for Haryana and will be extended to the whole country in six months.

Under this initiative the Department has built up a capacity to assess per hectare production in a village of wheat, mustard, gram, for the Rabi crops and for rice and cotton in the khariff crops. The estimates generated by the Department were tallied with crop cutting data for 6000 villages of Haryana. Validation showed that for ninety five percent of the villages per hectare production assessment at the village level were accurate. In built in this capacity was also a suite for real time monitoring of crop health.

Weekly crop assessments were run for the Haryana Districts and it was possible to mark out areas which were under stress either due to heat conditions or due to lack of water. Daily/weekly/monthly rainfall, temperature and soil moisture data are being provided to the Haryana Government for trial. Government of Haryana will expand the dissemination of this information to the districts whereby these parameters can be monitored upto the village level.

The Government of Haryana had posed a problem regarding sown area under different crops in the current khariff season. Cropped area data normally is available much later in the season when the land surveys are done. Under the current project this will be possible on a fortnightly basis and first estimates upto 19th July have been provided. The Department has delineated the areas under different crops for each of the districts. By middle of August, firm estimates of cropped area will be available and production estimates will be provided before harvesting.

Shri Sibal that this initiative will provide the groundwork for making crop insurance more meaningful thereby extending the social safety net for the farming community. Currently it has not been possible to extend this because of lack of production data at the village level. Now with production data validated at the village level, an option is now open to the Government. This capability will not only monitor onset of drought in real time but also provide capability to assess crop damage due to onset of an extreme weather condition. Similar support can be provided to alternate insurance products such as weather insurance which depend on rainfall parameters.

The Minister further added that this is only the beginning of the work for strengthening support to the farming communities. He said that as we progress, methodologies for assessment of crop diseases will also be built into the programme. In order to provide whole hearted support to the farmers and increase agriculture production, the Department will build this into a full fledged mission.

Source : Press Information Bureau
Date : July 30, 2007