BHUBANESWAR: Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Empowerment Sobha Karandlaje has stated that the smart sampling technique (SST) provides accurate yield estimation of crops and is helping in timely insurance claim settlements of farmers in case of crop loss.
In response to the defective method of crop cutting report system in Odisha raised in Lok Sabha, the Union Minister in a letter to BJP MP Suresh Pujari recently said, “This technique (SST) is an alternative to the old random selection of crop cutting experiments (CCEs) plot which is based on statistical random table irrespective of the proportion to the crop health.”
She said SST was initiated on a pilot scheme in selected States including Odisha during Kharif 2018 to assess crop loss accurately and it is being implemented since Kharif 2020 across the country for select major crops.
Under SST, yield attributing factors (remote sensing-based vegetation parameters) are used to stratify the cropped area into 4-5 categories (from healthy to poor) and then randomly select sample locations within each category proportion to the weightage of particular strata.
At present, SST points are being generated at Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC) on the remote sensing-based vegetation parameters and ground-truthing (information collected on location) points provided by the State governments concerned. The information is then shared with State Remote Sensing Centres (SRSC).