India’s food security mission, benefiting over 800 million people, relies on surplus food grains procured from farmers under the Minimum Support Price (MSP) Scheme. However, the self-reporting nature of the MSP procurement system often leads to errors and inflated claims by millions of farmers across billions of plots. To address this, the State of Odisha introduced an innovative Crop Production & Procurement Monitoring System. Integrating IT, GIS, big data analytics, AI/ML, and satellite remote sensing, this system mandates farmer registration, requiring details about cultivated land and personal information.
Since implementation, the system has increased the participation of small, medium, and marginal farmers in paddy procurement from 77% to 87%. Satellite image-based validation, implemented since the monsoon crop season 2021-22, has prevented procurement of inflated claims amounting to 2 million metric tons of paddy over the last five crop seasons, resulting in direct savings of about $500 million USD. Additionally, indirect savings have been realized in transportation, storage, processing, and distribution costs. Key highlights of the system include:
- Web-based farmer registration system. Big data analytics to analyze past farmers’ reporting frequency, changes in plot area or ownership, and past misreporting instances.
- Preparation and updating of land cadastral maps covering the entire state, including current land ownership information.
- GIS mapping of farmer registration data onto revenue cadastral maps.
- Analysis of cloud-free 2.4m resolution PlanetScope Mx base map images, taken during the crop maturity period, using AI/ML algorithms for identifying farmer misreporting with geo-location.
- Location-based mobile application for field navigation & verification of suspected misreporting by departmental surveyors. Generation of misreporting lists at district and village levels, estimating eligible procurement quantities against valid crop reporting, and issuance of procurement tokens to farmers.
- Procurement monitoring at Paddy Procurement Centres, including transportation to rice mills and warehouses.
