There has been widespread application of Space Technology in fields like Agriculture, Soils, Water Resources, Land Use/Land Cover, Rural Development, Earth and Climate Studies, Geosciences, Urban & Infrastructure, Disaster Management Support, Forestry and Ecology and Using Geospatial Technology as a tool for enabling Decision Support Systems.

Space technology is being utilized as a modern tool for supplementing, improving and expediting infrastructural development as well as implementation of various welfare schemes. Space technology is now being used in diverse sectors including Railways, Roads and Bridges, Medical management/telemedicine, procurement of timely Utilization Certificates, disaster forecast and management etc.

Following are some examples of space technology being employed in specific sectors –

Agriculture – Satellite driven seasonal cropping pattern, experiments on yield estimation, estimation of net-sown crop area and agricultural drought assessment studies are being conducted. Similarly, in the area of Soils, land degradation maps were generated and are useful for planning soil conservation / reclamation programs, land use planning, for bringing additional areas into cultivation and also to improve productivity levels in degraded lands. Maps of salt affected and water logging area, soil erosion maps are provided in BHUVAN portal. Satellite data from IRS sensors are being used to generate soil maps through monoscopic (non-stereoscopic) visual interpretation and computer-assisted digital analysis approaches.

Forestry – Apart from other activities, analysis of forest cover change, spatial biomass estimation, Community Biodiversity characterization, Forest fire alert system, inputs to working plan and wildlife plan preparation, Forest carbon sequestration, Inputs to UNFCCC etc are being carried out. In the area of Disaster Management, current activities are: Near Real Time Flood & Cyclone monitoring & mapping in the country, Flood Hazard/Risk Zonation for Flood prone states, Spatial Flood Early Warning, forest fire alerts, landslide zonation and inventory, agricultural drought studies among others.

Rural Development – There are several initiatives/projects, which are taken up by State and Central Government departments at micro and macro level to enrich the assets required in the rural sector. Some examples are Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) (collected information on 3.5 crore assets), Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP), Integrated Watershed Management, Programme (IWMP) (collected information on 1.5 Lakh points), and On Farm Water Management (OFWM), National Health Resource Repository (NHRR) Project, Rural connectivity, Sanitation, which uses the latest remote sensing and GIS technologies in operational modes.

Source: PIB