Satellite mapping to cut fake Rythu Bharosa claims; Telangana eyes ₹2,000 crore savings
HYDERABAD: The Telangana government has decided to deploy satellite mapping and advanced technologies to verify land cultivation during the ongoing rabi season, aiming to ensure that financial assistance under the Rythu Bharosa scheme reaches only genuine farmers and cultivated lands.
The rabi assistance of ₹6,000 per acre is proposed to be disbursed in January, coinciding with the Sankranti festival, after the government receives and analyses satellite-based cultivation data, officials said.
Agriculture minister Tummala Nageswara Rao directed the agriculture department to expedite the satellite mapping exercise and submit a comprehensive report on cultivated lands by the first week of January. He said the rabi-season Rythu Bharosa assistance would be released strictly based on satellite data, marking a shift from the existing verification mechanism.
During the recent kharif season, the state transferred around ₹9,000 crore under Rythu Bharosa. Officials estimate that by using satellite mapping to weed out uncultivable and fallow lands from the beneficiary list in rabi, the government could save at least ₹2,000 crore. The move is also expected to improve transparency and reduce scope for errors or misuse.
The satellite mapping project is being implemented through Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University, with technical support from an Italy-based Synthetic Aperture Radar agency. The government has sanctioned ₹9 crore for the project for two years and will allocate ₹2.40 crore annually towards operational expenses.
As part of the initiative, PJTSAU and the SAR agency will conduct satellite surveys across all districts in the first week of every month and submit periodic reports detailing lands under cultivation and those left uncultivated.
At present, agriculture extension officers are responsible for visiting fields and uploading details of cropped area and crop type survey number-wise through a mobile application. However, the government has received complaints that due to heavy workload, some officers uploaded data without physically inspecting fields.
Each officer is tasked with covering nearly 5,000 acres across four villages, making fiel level verification difficult. Telangana has more than 12,000 gram panchayats grouped into 2,604 clusters, with one assistant agriculture extension officer for each cluster, responsible for digital surveys covering about 1.5 crore acres.
In the kharif season this year, Rythu Bharosa assistance of ₹6,000 per acre was extended to about 70.45 lakh farmers covering 1.06 crore acres. Beneficiaries included 24.22 lakh farmers owning below one acre, 17.02 lakh up to two acres, 10.45 lakh up to three acres, 6.33 lakh up to four acres, 4.43 lakh up to five acres and eight lakh farmers owning more than five acres.
