Space Technology, Creating a New Space in Agriculture

The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare is proposing a new integrated programme, called National Programme on use of Space Technology for Agriculture (NPSTA), envisaging the integrated use of Space and Geospatial Tools for Mapping, Monitoring and Management of Agriculture.

The programme will have four sub-programmes catering to various themes viz. Crop Assessment & Monitoring; Agricultural Resources Management; Disaster Monitoring and Mitigation and Satellite Communication and Navigation Applications. All the current running programmes, such as FASAL (for crop forecasting), NADAMS (for drought assessment), CHAMAN (for horticultural assessment and development), KISAN (for crop insurance) and Crop Intensification planning, will be subsumed under this proposed programmes.

In order to increase the availability of certified or quality seeds to the farmers locally, the Government has proposed to set up 500 numbers of seed production and seed processing units at Gram Panchayath Level.