Geo-tagging of Agriculture Assets

An MoU was signed on April 6, 2017 between Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) for geo-tagging of agriculture land.

What is Geo-tagging?

  • Geo-tagging: It is the process of adding geographical identification like latitude and longitude to various media such as a photo or video. Geo-tagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information from a device. It provides users the location of the content of a given picture.
  • Geo-mapping: It is avisual representation of the geographical location of geo-tagged assetslayered on top of map or satellite imagery.

Why is Geo-tagging Important?

  • Several assets are created in the states under various schemes of the Ministry of Agriculture.
  • Under RKVY also, states have been utilising substantial amount of funds for creation of infrastructure/assets in agriculture and allied sectors. Monitoring of such wide spread activities is of paramount importance to states and Government of India to understand flow of funds, inventorising the assets, bringing in transparency, planning of assets for future, and finally informing the farmers about the facilities available.
  • PM on several occasions emphasised on use of technology for reporting of assets created through geo-tagging. Finance Minister also highlighted monitoring of MGNREGA assets through Geo-tagging in his budget speech.
  • Geo-tagging for monitoring of assets is already started in Ministry of Rural Development for MGNREGA and Department of Land Resources for monitoring of watershed activities in the states. Postal department has also geo-tagged the post offices using NRSC Bhuvan Platform.

One Crore MGNREGA Assets Geo-tagged

  • Mahatma Gandhi NREGS reached a new milestone on April 21 by geotagging one Crore assets and putting them in public domain.
  • The scale of rural assets created under MGNREGA is very large.
  • Since the inception of the programme in financial year 2006-07, about 2.82 Crore assets have been created under the programme.
  • On an average, about 30 Lakh Assets are created annually which includes a variety of works such as water harvesting structures, plantations, rural infrastructure, flood control measures, individual assets for sustainable livelihood, community infrastructure and so on.
  • Special focus is being given to geo-tag Natural Resource Management works especially the water related works.

Who Does It?

  • National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), ISRO at Hyderabad does geo-tagging of assets.
  • This centre of ISRO has a software platform, Bhuvan that allows users to explore a 2D/3D representation of the surface of the Earth. It also acts as a platform for hosting government data.
  • NRSC is involved in mapping of resources (Postal, GAIL, Forest, etc.) as well as monitoring of assets created under various schemes of Ministry of Water Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, etc.
  • The assets created under RKVY could be monitored by Geo-tagging them using BHUVAN, a geo-platform of National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) of ISRO, Hyderabad.

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