Column : Getting it right on agriculture

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: The success of Chandrayaan-1 makes India only the sixth country in the world to send a spaceship to the moon.

And while the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) works towards putting a man on the moon next, it has been building up important capabilities off the public radar.

For instance, the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), an ISRO baby headquartered in Hyderabad. Armed with two modern aircraft for aerial remote sensing and data from a host of its own as well as foreign satellites, this ISRO centre is mapping invaluable data about our water resources, land use patterns, and mineral exploration prospects. NRSC’s large scale mapping capabilities enable it to survey our coastal resources, ecology and urban areas. In one of the exercises currently underway, all of India’s forests are being mapped digitally to generate data that can explain how our forests are becoming fragmented and the areas where this could trigger the worst repercussions. According to a senior scientist at the Centre, 70% of the mapping is done and the rest should be complete by March 2010.

This, like other NRSC works such as monitoring seasonal variations on a daily basis, would throw up a wealth of actionable information and could help policymakers immensely in redesigning development and relief schemes to ensure better targeting. As the PM said, scientific knowledge ‘enables us’ to improve several facets of our social economy—but the benefits will only accrue if the knowledge is put to work. State and central governments don’t always appreciate or harness the capabilities that centres like NRSC have built up over the years. The expert group on rural indebtedness appointed by the PM to examine the extent and gravity of farmers’ distress, following his visit to suicide-stricken Vidarbha in 2006, had called for an advanced crop surveillance mechanism for forecasting the prospects of drought.

To its shock, it found that the NRSC had already been making drought assessments based on satellite data at the district level for 10 drought-prone districts and at the mandal/taluka level for three states—Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra—for at least a couple of years before the farmer suicides became headline news.