Remote Sensing & Satellite Technology

Unlike every other technology on the Agri Technology hub, this one has no product to buy. It is a set of government-run programmes that read a satellite image of a field instead of sending a person to walk it, and feed that reading into decisions that were already being made some other way — a crop-insurance payout, a drought declaration, increasingly a bank's loan assessment.

This matters most where a farmer is already enrolled in PMFBY, already living through a drought year, or already applying for an agricultural loan — the technology changes how those existing processes are carried out, not whether they exist at all.

Six programmes cover the field today, laid out in full in the programmes section above: YES-TECH inside PMFBY crop insurance, WINDS supplying the weather data underneath it, FASAL forecasting production ahead of harvest, NADAMS assessing drought, Bhuvan as the one free public-facing map, and Krishi-DSS as the still-rolling-out layer meant to unify all of this into farm-level advisories.

Each is run by a different arm of government — mainly MNCFC and ISRO's NRSC — and each feeds a different downstream decision, which is why they are described separately here rather than as one combined system.

YES-TECH assigns a minimum 30% weightage to a satellite-and-AI-derived yield estimate inside the PMFBY payout calculation, alongside the traditional manual Crop Cutting Experiment. It started with paddy and wheat in Kharif 2023, was extended to soybean in Kharif 2024, and has been adopted by 9 states so far — Madhya Pradesh has gone further, moving to 100% technology-based yield estimation for its covered crops.

See the manual vs technology comparison above for exactly what changes where it applies, and crops covered for which specific crops FASAL and YES-TECH track today.

WINDS (Weather Information Network & Data System) is the infrastructure layer most farmers never hear about directly: a network of hyperlocal automatic weather stations, launched in July 2023 and funded through PMFBY's own technology fund, feeding the dense local weather readings YES-TECH's yield models actually need to work.

Its purpose is entirely upstream — better weather data means a more defensible yield estimate, which is the stated goal behind pairing WINDS with YES-TECH: faster, more transparent PMFBY claim settlement.

FASAL (Forecasting Agricultural output using Space, Agro-meteorology and Land-based observations) is a different kind of programme from YES-TECH — it is not tied to insurance claims at all. Run by MNCFC, it generates pre-harvest, satellite-based production estimates for 11 major crops across 20 states and 557 districts, feeding national production planning rather than any individual farmer's payout.

See the crops covered grid above for the full list — nine of FASAL's 11 tracked crops already have a full guide on this site.

NADAMS (National Agricultural Drought Assessment & Monitoring System) is the oldest programme on this page — ISRO's NRSC has run it since 1990, producing fortnightly satellite-based drought severity assessments across 14 drought-prone states at state, district and sub-district level.

Its output feeds into the government's official drought-review process, but the declaration itself, and any relief that follows, still comes from the state or district administration — see the honest limits above for why a satellite flag is not automatically a relief payment.

Every other programme on this page reaches a farmer indirectly, through an insurer, a bank or a government process. Bhuvan is the exception — ISRO's free public geoportal, live since August 2009, lets anyone view satellite imagery, NDVI vegetation-health data and drought maps for any location in India, in English, Hindi, Tamil or Telugu, with no login, fee or enrolment.

It is a technical, GIS-style tool rather than a push-notification app, and general awareness of it among farmers remains low — see what you can actually do above for how to actually open and use it.

Krishi-DSS, part of the wider Digital Agriculture Mission (₹2,817 crore, FY2023-24 to FY2025-26, launched August 2024), is the attempt to unify satellite, soil and weather data into one AI-powered layer, with a target of mapping 142 million hectares of soil profile nationally and, eventually, individual farm-level advisories.

It is still rolling out state by state through 2026 — real and funded, but not yet a finished, everywhere-available tool. The honest position, consistent with this hub's editorial rule, is to describe it as in progress rather than to claim it already reaches every farmer.

Beyond the four limitations listed above — cloud cover during the monsoon, resolution limits on very small plots, crop- and state-specific coverage, and the gap between a satellite flag and an actual payout — the underlying pattern is the same across every programme here: this is real, growing, government-funded infrastructure, not a finished product available to every farmer for every crop today.

The most useful thing a farmer can do is check, each season, whether their own state and crop are actually covered — through the PMFBY helpline, a bank, or a Common Service Centre — rather than assuming either that the technology already applies everywhere, or that it does not exist at all.