Kisan Drones

Kisan Drones

Topic: Agriculture

In news:

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the Centre will promote ‘Kisan Drones’ to help farmers assess crops, digitise land records as well as spray insecticides and nutrients.

About:

• Drone services is an emerging market that finds application in agriculture, construction, search and rescue, package delivery, industrial inspection, insurance and videography.
• In 2021, the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare brought out a standard operating procedure for spraying pesticides and nutrients through drones.
• The Finance Minister has announced the use of ‘kisan drones’ for crop assessment, digitalisation of land records and spraying agri-nutrients like fertilisers and pesticides.
• The idea behind using drones could be to reduce human exposure to poisonous chemicals.
• Crop assessment using drones will help crop insurance companies.
• This will give a fillip to increasing the yield of the small and marginal farmers in India.
• The Centre had earlier envisioned using drones to digitise land records.
• These flying objects will survey the land, the government proposed, and officials can use the data to match with recorded information, according to the plan.
• The digitised data could be used to build Agristak, a collection of technology-based interventions in agriculture proposed by the Centre.
• The government will support these industries in building domestic capacities as well as promoting research and development.
• This initiative would bring academia, industry and public institutions together.