From weather forecasts to climate resilience: The future of farming in India
A recent report examined how integrated weather-data and satellite-observation platforms are reshaping disaster assessment and crop insurance payouts in Indian agriculture.
The report highlights that a single platform capturing a flood, heatwave, landslide or drought event can substitute for slow, manual field surveys traditionally used to assess crop damage.
This shift is presented as enabling faster claim settlement, with compensation potentially reaching farmers within days rather than after an entire crop season.
The discussion links to ongoing government efforts to densify weather-station networks and migrate crop-yield estimation to remote sensing under the national crop insurance scheme.
Weather Information Network Data System (WINDS)
WINDS is a national initiative under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) that pools hyperlocal weather data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), state governments, and public/private agencies onto one unified portal. It is being strengthened with new Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) at the block/tehsil level and Automatic Rain Gauges (ARGs) at the gram panchayat level, aiming for weather data resolution down to the local level across the country.
Key Details
- Implemented under the Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare as part of PMFBY's technology stack.
- Supports drought/disaster management, more accurate short-range forecasting, and the design of parametric (index-based) insurance products.
- Complements YES-TECH (Yield Estimation System using Technology), which mandates a minimum weightage for remote-sensing-derived yield data (introduced for paddy and wheat from the Kharif 2023 season).
The "platform-observed" disaster detection described in the report is precisely the function WINDS and YES-TECH are designed to perform — replacing ground-based Crop Cutting Experiments (CCEs) with satellite and sensor data for faster, more objective damage assessment.
Weather-Index-Based vs. Area-Yield-Based Crop Insurance
PMFBY (launched 2016) primarily uses an area-yield index approach, where indemnity is based on the average yield of a defined insurance unit (village/cluster) estimated via crop-cutting experiments, compared to a threshold yield. A parallel scheme, the Restructured Weather-Based Crop Insurance Scheme (RWBCIS), uses a weather-index approach, where payouts trigger automatically when specific weather parameters (rainfall, temperature, humidity) at a reference weather station breach pre-set thresholds — irrespective of actual measured crop loss.
Key Details
- Weather-index insurance settles claims faster since it does not require on-ground yield measurement, but carries "basis risk" (weather station data may not reflect a specific farmer's field conditions).
- Area-yield based insurance is more accurate to actual loss but slower, since it depends on crop cutting experiments conducted after harvest.
- Remote sensing and AWS/ARG densification are explicitly aimed at narrowing this basis-risk gap.
The report's core theme — moving claim settlement from "seasons" to "days" — is the practical case for shifting weight from slow area-yield methods toward faster weather-index and remote-sensing-triggered payouts.
National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA)
NICRA is ICAR's flagship network project addressing climate change impacts on agriculture, launched on 2 February 2011. It has four components: Strategic Research, Technology Demonstration, Capacity Building, and Sponsored/Competitive Grants, covering crops, natural resource management, livestock, and fisheries.
Key Details
- Strategic research identifies climate-vulnerable districts and develops adaptive crop varieties and management practices.
- Technology Demonstration component runs Climate Resilient Villages showcasing location-specific adaptation practices.
NICRA represents the research and on-ground adaptation arm of climate-resilient agriculture, complementary to the data/insurance-platform side (WINDS/YES-TECH) discussed in the report.
- PMFBY was launched in 2016; RWBCIS is its weather-index-based counterpart scheme.
- YES-TECH mandates remote-sensing data get at least 30% weightage in yield estimation for paddy and wheat, starting Kharif 2023.
- WINDS proposes AWS at block/tehsil level and ARG at gram panchayat level for hyperlocal weather data.
- NICRA was launched by ICAR on 2 February 2011 with four components (Strategic Research, Technology Demonstration, Capacity Building, Sponsored Grants).