New biomass model may help monitor crop damage, health
india suffers considerable losses due to crop damage every year. assocham has pegged this loss at Rs 140,000 crore for 2006-07. Unfortunately, there is no way to ascertain whether this or similar statistics are reliable. But the government might just have come up with a monitoring mechanism.
The only method that the government has, at present, to find out statistics of crop losses is through patwaris. There is no system to monitor false claims of crop losses. The Union ministry of science and technology (most) has developed a computer-based model, which uses biomass index to monitor crop health. The model is being tested in Haryana