Satellite-Based Crop Monitoring Expanded Under FASAL Programme to Strengthen Pre-Harvest Forecasting: Centre

New Delhi, December 2: The Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC) is strengthening India’s pre-harvest crop estimation system through satellite-based monitoring under the FASAL programme, covering major kharif and rabi crops across 557 districts.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, the programme currently generates production estimates for paddy, wheat, jute, cotton, sugarcane, soybean, tur, gram, mustard, lentil and rabi sorghum. Multispectral and microwave satellite data are used for crop mapping, while weather data and remote-sensing indices support predictive yield models.

The programme spans 20 states, including Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

The government said satellite inputs are being widely deployed under the PMFBY crop insurance scheme to plan Crop Cutting Experiments and estimate yields at the gram panchayat level for paddy, wheat and soybean using the YESTech system. These datasets are also used to address discrepancies in area and yield reports.

The Ministry said it is collaborating with the Indian Space Research Organisation on operationalising crop yield estimates using a semi-physical modelling approach. ISRO centres are also assisting with research to expand satellite-based assessment to additional crops.

State agriculture departments are supporting the effort by providing ground-truth data needed to train crop-mapping models under the FASAL programme.

This information was provided by Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Ramnath Thakur in a written reply in Lok Sabha on Tuesday.