April 30, 2025

Satellites help determine wheat production of eight Indian states would be 123 million tonnes as of end March

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in a study using its satellites estimated that the total wheat production from eight major wheat growing states of India would be 122.724 million tonnes as of March 31, 2025.

According to the space agency, the Comprehensive Remote Sensing Observation on Crop Progress (CROP), a semi-automated and scalable framework, developed by ISRO's National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), enables the near real-time monitoring of crop sowing and harvesting during the Rabi season across India.

ISRO said that using this approach, the progress of wheat sown areas and the overall crop condition across Indian states were systematically assessed, using Optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing datasets from EOS-04 (RISAT-1A), EOS-06 (Oceansat-3), and Resourcesat-2A, for the Rabi season, 2024-25. It added that the sowing progress of the wheat crop is being monitored across the eight states during the 2024-25 Rabi season.

The states are Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, Gujarat, and Maharashtra.

ISRO said that experimental assessment of wheat production, at the national scale, is done by assimilating satellite-derived parameters such as crop area, sowing date information, and in-season crop condition in a process-based crop growth simulation model at 5km × 5km spatial resolution.

"The multi-source data integration is expected to enhance the accuracy of production estimation at a finer spatial level, supporting precise, and scalable estimation of wheat production," ISRO said. "The total wheat production from eight major wheat-growing states of India as on March 31 is estimated to be 122.724 million tonnes."

- The Hindu