In Gujarat, India, a cotton farmer receives an app notification: “Early signs of bollworm stress detected, take preventive measures.” In West Bengal, a paddy grower is alerted: “Water stress identified, initiate timely irrigation.” Meanwhile in Nashik, a grape farmer accesses his mobile app to find low nitrogen and phosphorus levels, along with a customised nutrient recommendation. Powered by satellite remote sensing, the app delivers timely insights and actionable solutions, helping farmers make informed decisions exactly when they matter most.
This isn’t the future; it’s already happening, quietly, in the hinterland of India.
Satellite remote sensing was once only available to climate scientists or urban planners accessing previously scarce data sources. But now it is increasingly being used by farmers and the businesses and organisations that serve them, enabling practical solutions to one of India’s biggest development challenges: the need for effective ways to increase productivity, resilience and inclusivity in agriculture.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the emergence of this technology is that it’s having a particularly strong impact on smallholders, who comprise almost 85% of the country’s farmers.
Why Indian Agriculture Needs a Digital Uplift
In India, agriculture supports the livelihoods of almost 55% of the rural population, and the agriculture sector contributes about 18% of the gross value added in the Indian economy. The sector has approximately 146 million farmers, most with landholdings of less than 1 hectare. These smallholders face increasing risks from climate variability, rising input costs and soil degradation.
The Indian government’s Economic Survey indicates that farm income in rainfed areas may decline by 20 – 25% due to climate change. Meanwhile, farmers’ traditional methods of monitoring their fields — which are based on manual inspection, intuition and knowledge of historical weather patterns — are ineffective in a world of poorly timed rainfall, surprise heat waves, pest surges and shifting planting seasons.
There’s a clear and growing need to shift to a new way of farm management — one informed by accurate data and supported by newly accessible technologies. But the challenge is how to make digital agriculture easily available to the farmers and other stakeholders that can benefit from it the most.
What is Satellite Remote Sensing — and Why Does it Matter for Farmers?
Satellite remote sensing involves capturing data about the Earth’s surface using satellites with sensors that are able to detect vegetation health, soil moisture, land temperatures, irrigation patterns and other key information. These satellites — both public (like Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 from the European Space Agency, and Landsat, SMAP and MODIS from NASA) and private (like Planet Labs and Maxar) — are continuously scanning agricultural land and producing large datasets that can be transformed into useful insights.
In practice, this provides the following benefits to farmers:
- Moisture stress detection enables farmers to irrigate more accurately and avoid over-watering.
- Vegetation indices enable plant health tracking and crop stress detection before it can be physically observed.
- Pest and disease detection is possible when satellite observations can track spatial changes in crop vitality.
- Planning for sowing and harvest windows becomes better because weather forecasts can be overlaid with soil conditions and crop conditions.
- Disaster damage assessment after floods and droughts is quicker and more objective.
Further enhancing these impacts, these insights are now being delivered to farmers as advisories through mobile apps, web portals, SMS and voice messages — usually in local languages and with audio-visual support when possible. So no matter what level of literacy a farmer has, they can be included.
The Emergence of Satellite Remote Sensing in India
Satellite remote sensing has a long history of use in urban planning and forestry, and it is now quietly transforming the smallholder agriculture sector in India. As climate uncertainty accelerates, it is helping farmers make smarter, data-guided decisions.
In Odisha, the World Bank-funded Odisha Integrated Irrigation Project for Climate Resilient Agriculture has used satellite data and crop modelling to deliver irrigation advisories across numerous districts. The initiative aims to benefit about 125,000 smallholder farmer households across 15 districts of Odisha and cover around 128,000 hectares of agricultural land.
In Maharashtra, the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing has collaborated with state agencies to map drought-prone areas using satellite imagery. This data has been instrumental in contingency planning and input subsidy guidance in high-risk districts, such as Solapur and Jalna.
In Punjab and Haryana, the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre uses remote sensing to identify early signs of crop stress, thereby allowing pest response to happen faster — something that is especially important in cases such as the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (India’s crop insurance program). The program protects farmers against losses from natural disasters, pests and diseases, and early detection through remote sensing helps it verify damage quickly, speeding up insurance claim processing and ensuring farmers receive timely compensation.
Although long-term data is still needed, these initiatives are already showing how satellite-enabled tools can support extension services that have long been stretched too thin, delivering timely, localised advice to farmers’ smart devices on their own schedule. For India’s primarily rainfed farmland, these are more than just helpful innovations — they can be decisive factors in a farm’s survival.
A Lifeline for Climate Resilience
As extreme weather and other climate impacts increase, opportunities for using satellite data for real-time risk mitigation or long-term resilience planning are becoming more frequent.
For example, the Indian Space Research Organisation has collaborated with the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre to launch numerous programs to estimate crop acreage, monitor droughts and assess flood damage using satellites, and the data these programs provide has become indispensable to:
- The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana program, which has implemented remote sensing to verify crop insurance claims and enable timely payments;
- State-level drought declarations, which involve the use of satellite-based indicators to help decide if a district is eligible to receive prospective relief packages; and
- Soil health monitoring, to support regenerative agriculture and carbon sequestering initiatives.
Through these and other efforts, satellite-based tools have strengthened climate vulnerability assessments across India, sharpening disaster preparedness and enabling more targeted, data-driven adaptation strategies.
Enabling Financial Inclusion to Close the Credit Gap for Farmers
Another compelling application of satellite intelligence is closing the credit gap for farmers in India. A large number of smallholder farmers, especially women and tenants, are unable to receive formal credit because they don’t have access to collateral or land titles.
To address this issue, fintechs and agri-lending institutions are using satellite data to conduct yield estimations, assess crop vigor and review irrigation histories, then using this information as industry-specific proxies of creditworthiness. This evidence-based model allows for:
- Remote verification of farm activity
- Flexible loan underwriting based on farm production, not farmer-reported documentation
- Dynamic risk-scoring, which can lower default rates and enable lenders to better target borrowers who are more likely to repay
To support credit-risk assessment for crops and allied operations, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has been extensively working with agritech and fintech agencies to encourage the adoption of satellite and remote sensing technology. Through programs supporting climate resilient agriculture and Farmer Producer Organisations, NABARD actively promotes the use of geospatial solutions for crop monitoring, loan targeting and insurance.
An Opportunity for Greater Gender Equity
Women are essential actors in Indian agriculture; 73% of rural women work in the sector, but they own only about 13% of the land. This disparity is driving women farmers’ lack of access to credit, technology and direct decision-making.
But change is underway. Across India, when digital farm advisories and mobile-based guidance are shared through women’s collectives, like self-help groups or Farmer Producer Companies, something powerful happens. Women begin to feel more informed and included, and their voices carry more weight in household and community decisions around farming. Research also shows that women who access such services are more likely to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices than those who don’t.
Of course, progress is rarely uniform. Women’s decision-making power and adoption of new practices are shaped by whether they have land rights, access to credit, supportive local extension services and policies that account for their needs.
Still, the opportunity is clear. By giving women — who already make up a substantial percentage of India’s agricultural workforce — access to inclusive, satellite-powered tools, we’re doing more than boosting yields or preparing farms for climate shocks. We’re putting knowledge and agency directly into their hands. That’s real empowerment: turning women farmers, long seen as helpers, into leaders and innovators in building climate resilience from the ground up.
Overcoming Barriers to Widespread Adoption
While satellite remote sensing has great potential, widespread adoption has been limited by a number of challenges. Among them is the issue of inconsistent data literacy and digital infrastructure in rural areas. Interpreting complex data often requires assistance from field agents or agri-extension services, and affordability is an obstacle for commercial models without governmental or philanthropic support.
However, despite these limitations, the situation is changing quickly, as the penetration of smartphones in rural India surpasses 67%, and digital agri-infrastructure platforms like India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) are being promoted by the national government.
If we want satellite-enabled farming to become the norm in India, the country’s agricultural ecosystem needs to invest in the following:
- Open data platforms that enable innovators to build farmer-friendly applications that leverage publicly available government datasets.
- Last-mile partnerships established with self-help groups, Farmer Producer Organisations and local institutions to translate satellite data insights into practical advice farmers can use.
- Collaboration between the public and private sectors to fund the subsidisation of precision agriculture tools in climate-vulnerable regions.
- Training programs to help rural youth act as “digital agriculture assistants” who are available year-round to educate farmers on how to incorporate satellite-based advisories into their practices.
A Quietly Transformative Revolution
The initial Green Revolution radically changed Indian agriculture through the use of seeds, fertilizers and irrigation systems. A new data-driven revolution is on its way.
While it may not be front-page news, a transformation is occurring every time sowing decisions are made using vegetation indexes, loans are issued based on satellite imagery rather than land papers, or irrigation pumps are controlled remotely.
Remote sensing will not resolve all the problems facing Indian agriculture. But alongside other technologies that are already in place, it is fast becoming an essential aid to improving agricultural decisions, yields and ultimately millions of livelihoods across the country.
Equipped with the right delivery model and partners for collaboration, these tools can now empower farmers in India to not only endure amidst widespread volatility, but to truly flourish.
Sat Kumar Tomer is co-founder and CEO of Satyukt Analytics Private Limited.
Photo credit: Userba011d64_201, via iStock Photo
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