Union Government launches KISAN Project and Hailstorm App for crop damage

October 6, 2015

Union Government has launched KISAN (Crop Insurance using Space Technology and Geoinformatics) Project to benefit farmers.
This project will favour use of satellites, drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) and other geospatial technology to collect crop yield data and to assess damage from natural calamities.
Key facts

Drones will help to take high resolution imagery of crop assessment. It will be collated with satellite imaging and other geospatial technology to get accurate data.
This data will enable crop insurance companies to give proper compensation to affected farmers. The experiment will help develop index-based data for insurance companies.
Initially this project will be implemented as pilot study in identified districts in Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
The programme will be jointly conducted by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNFC), India Meteorological Department (IMD), Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), State Agriculture Departments and Remote Sensing Centres.

Implication: It will help farmers, government agencies and insurance companies to move away from traditional crop insurance claim calculated on the basis of crop cutting experiments.
It will provide timely and accurate data for insurance claims and make payment of claims to farmers without any delay.
Hailstorm App for crop damage
Union Government also launched Hailstorm App, an Android mobile phone application to assess large-scale damage to crops from hail.
Farmers by using this application on their smart phones can immediately send photos of their crop damage due to hailstorm to officials concerned for immediate relief.

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