AP Benefits From ISRO’s Space Application Projects, Says Union Minister

Kakinada: The Union minister of state attached to the PMO, Jitendra Singh, has said Space application projects being executed for Andhra Pradesh with technical support from ISRO for the past five years are benefiting the agriculture sector.

He cited the introduction of plans for satellite-based monitoring of crop sown area and harvest area progression, as also the cropped area and yield maps for rice crop, and the generation of crop sown area maps using SAR data by the end of August.

The minister for state was replying to a question in Rajya Sabha from member Sana Satish, who sought details of space application projects supported by ISRO/NRSC in AP in agriculture, fisheries, disaster management, urban planning, tele-education, tele-medicine and water resources.

Jitendra Singh said the Department of Fisheries, with technology developed by ISRO using NavIC and communication satellite, rolled out the Vessel Communication and Support System project under PMMSY, to provide two-way communication between fishermen on boat and the control room in the coastal states.

He said that near-real time mapping, monitoring and damage assessment of major disaster like floods, cyclones, forest fire, preparation of flood hazard zonation atlas using 21 years of flood inundation data, dissemination flood alerts with 2-day lead time for flood in Godavari river etc were applied by the space technology to disaster management.

The technology, the minister said, is also providing support to urban planning such as implementation of Bhuvan WebGIS and a mobile application for the state housing corporation, towards geotagging of houses, enabling the monitoring of the construction and repair works.

He said the department of space continues to support tele-medicine and tele-education networks by providing satellite capacity and technical assistance and mapping and inventory of wetlands, as also coastal water quality assessment for water resources.