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5. Crop Insurance Support Services5.1 Using Satellite Imagery in Crop InsuranceRemote Sensing Technology (RST)
is the emerging technology, which has the potential to offer plenty of complimentary and value added aids for crop insurance. It not only provides insurers with tools like hazard mapping, crop health reports, acreage-sown confirmation,
yield
modeling, etc, that importantly verify claims, but also strengthens the position of insurers, vis-à-vis the reinsurance market.
The technology is already being tried out in agriculture insurance,
in countries like theUnited States of America (USA, Canada, Australia, etc, for locating damaged areas and estimating the extent of damage.
The Agriculture Insurance Company of India Limited (AIC), realizing the potential of RST
has conducted a few pilots between 2003 and 2005. These pilots were with reference to. (i)
estimating cropped acreage under different crops (ii) stress detection and crop health reporting and (iii) generating yield estimates at insurance unit level for insured crops.
The pilot did reveal some inadequacies in the implementation of this technology, like difficulty in getting cloud-free images (particularly
during the Kharif season, unsuitability for crops with lower foliage / biomass, high-resolution data being expensive, etc. Still, RST
in the coming days, is likely to play a very important role in crop insurance.
RST lends greater credibility to an insurer’s efforts towards securing reinsurance, since these technologies are being used in developed countries.
Unbiased, objective and independent data, enables the insurer to crosscheck and supplement other field information inputs. Independent information sources, will help check inflated claims. Periodic independent ground investigations based on satellite and Geographic Information System
(GIS), will further limit such claims. Remote sensing data on crop area and
relative productivity levels, will be available well before the cutoff date for receipt of crop yield data provided by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics (DES), facilitating adequate ground validation. In-season monitoring will assist monitoring of crop progress, and provide
advance warning of expected claims after the season. Similarly,
the geo-referenced GISdatabase, would provide the basis for reliable analysis and risk mapping zones.
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