Agricultural is the backbone of Indian economy, providing livelihood to about seventy percent of the population and contributing approximately forty percent to the Gross National Product. Food grain production has increased from 51 millions tons in 1951 to 182.57 million tons in 2002-03. On the other end, the Indian population crossed the billion and needs around 235 million tons of food grains and calling for efficient agricultural management for better utilization of land and water resources on a sustainable basis. In this context reliable information of agricultural resources and their monitoring is very essential.

The remarkable developments in space borne remote sensing (RS) technology and its pplications have firmly established its immense potential for inventorying agriculture resources. The spatial resolution of the sensors of the Indian Remote Sensing satellites range from very fine resolution LISS-IV and PAN data of 5.8 meters to moderate resolution WiFS data of 180 m through 56 m data of AWiFS and 24 meter LISS-III with the re-visit period ranging from 5 days to 24 days and swath ranging from 70 km to about 800 km which enables generation of crop information at various levels. Medium resolution data such as LISS-III / AWIFS is useful for generating crop information at district level whereas regional level information is derivable from both AWiFS / WiFS data. High resolution is useful for inventorying of multiple/ small holding crops and horticultural crops at sub-district/ cadastral levels.

NRSC has carried out various projects in the field of agriculture including crop acreage and production estimation, agricultural drought assessment, cropping pattern / system analysis, crop monitoring, crop condition assessment and horticulture crop inventory etc. It is providing pre-harvest crop information on operational basis for major food crops viz., paddy, wheat and jowar, oilseeds crop viz., soybean, groundnut, commercial crops viz., cotton and sugarcane under the Crop Acreage and Production Estimation (CAPE) project.The agricultural conditions are routinely monitored using coarse resolution NOAA-AVHRR data at state level and IRS WiFS & AWiFS data at State and district levels under the project, National Agricultural Drought Assessment & Monitoring System (NADAMS).