With accurate estimation of crop acreage, yield and productivity becoming increasingly important for sound policy interventions, a high-powered committee, headed by agricultural economist A Vaidyanathan, has recommended use of remote sensing technique for determining land use, crop area and yield estimates.
?Use of remote sensing for estimating land use and crop-wise area will surely reduce the dependence on plot-wise recording by village officials and also facilitate shift towards more sophisticated techniques of stratified sampling for crop cutting experiments,? the committee said .
It has also recommended constitution of a National Crop Statistics Centre (NCSC) which would be an autonomous body, fully-funded by the government to design, organise and supervise the generation of crop area and yield estimates in the state and national-level.
?Once this centre is established, the present system of supervision by both NSSO and state under the central sector scheme of Improvement of Crop Statistics will be modified,? the committee said. It also recommended restructuring the scope, organisation and management of existing system of collecting primary data.
Among other things, the committee said the Centre should take the initiative in taking advantage of new technology such as use of hand-held devices for field data collection, online data transmission besides computerised processing for preparation of the state/national estimates based on the sampling methodology.