National Remote Sensing Centre Researchers Add New Findings in the Area of Crop Insurance (Paddy crop insurance using satellite-based composite index of crop performance): Agriculture – Crop Insurance

Agriculture Daily

2022 DEC 14 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Agriculture Daily -- Research findings on crop insurance are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting out of the National Remote Sensing Centre by NewsRx editors, research stated, “The well-known area-yield crop insurance contract, guaranteeing a certain percent of normal yield over an insured area, is losing its effectiveness due to poor quality yield data.”

The news editors obtained a quote from the research from National Remote Sensing Centre: “This paper introduces a ‘satellite-derived crop health index’ as an alternative to yield data in such an insurance model. The new approach was implemented in the 2020 crop season, covering 3.5 million ha of paddy crop over 3200 Insurance Units in the West Bengal state of India. Data of Sentinel satellites, gridded weather data, and Mobile-app based field data were analyzed to generate paddy crop map and crop health indicators, namely NDVI, LSWI, Backscatter and FAPAR for the current (2020) and past years (2016-2019). Using the metrics derived from these indices and entropy technique, a composite index of crop performance called Crop Health Factor (CHF), ranging from 0-1, was generated. Deviations of CHF and yield between the years showed good correlation. The CHF data has successfully replaced the yield data for indemnity and pay-out assessments in 2020, as notified by the Government in advance.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Thus, this project makes an entry point for developing remote sensing based transformative crop insurance solutions to enhance risk transfer in agriculture which perhaps the most plausible way forward.”

For more information on this research see: Paddy crop insurance using satellite-based composite index of crop performance. Geomatics, Natural Hazards & Risk, 2022,13(1):310-336. (Geomatics, Natural Hazards & Risk - http://www.tandfonline.com/TGNH). The publisher for Geomatics, Natural Hazards & Risk is Taylor & Francis Group.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/19475705.2021.2025155.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting C. S. Murthy, National Remote Sensing Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation. Additional authors for this research include Malay Kumar Poddar, Karun Kumar Choudhary, Varun Pandey, P. Srikanth, Siddesh Ramasubramanian, G. Senthil Kumar.