Big data analytics makes its way into the Indian agriculture sector through SatSure

Big data analytics makes its way into the Indian agriculture sector through SatSure

Link :https://www.facebook.com/india.iccf/posts/216076162234506

By working closely with the government and financial institutions, SatSure aims to ensure that the country’s agricultural growth corresponds to our food security, along with the financial security of farmers.

India grapples with immediate challenges such as depleting groundwater resources, climate change,  extreme events like droughts and floods. Due to the lack of fair and timely compensation for losses incurred and the lack of transparency in fixing the fair price for the produce combined with the difficulty in access to markets, there is a need for the agrarian society to explore technology as a medium to mitigate both farm and financial distress.

Deeply moved by farmer suicides and debt, lack of access to scientific agricultural practices, dwindling farm holding sizes, and institutional apathy, 33-year-old Abhishek Raju founded SatSure, a data analytics company which integrates satellite, weather, and IoT analytics with the agriculture sector in 2015.

Although satellite data have been used to monitor the agricultural sector for the last three decades, Abhishek believes that the complex relationships between parameters governing crop growth and soil health have had a limited scope within the research community. SatSure uses its proprietary machine learning and parallel computing techniques, to resolve these complex relationships and get insights into the crop phenology.

“The motto of our national space programme has always been to use satellite applications for national development. As products of Dr Vikram Sarabhai’s vision, we chose to take the entrepreneurship route for building on the good work done by ISRO and assisting in the commoditisation of satellite-based solutions, which is the core for investing in space technology — trickle-down economics,” he adds.

Explaining further he says that the current practice of crop cutting experiments (CCEs), to get an estimation of total agricultural production, is both a manual and time intensive process. Instead, farmers can opt for smart sampling procedure using satellite-based crop clustering techniques, which reduces the time for identification of these plots and optimise their locations.