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CHAMAN: A National Level

Programme for Horticultural
Assessment & Development

NNRMS BULLETIN
Ray SS1, Mamatha S1, Manjunath KR2, Uday Raj3, Seshasai MVR3,
Singh KK4, Kimothi MM1, Parihar JS2 and Mamta Saxena5
1
Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre, DACFW, Pusa Campus, New Delhi
2
Space Applications Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad
3
National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO, Hyderabad
4
India Meteorological Department, New Delhi
4
Horticulture Division, DACFW, Pusa Campus, New Delhi-110012
Email: shibendu.ncfc@nic.in

Introduction
Over the years, horticulture has emerged as one of the potential agricultural
enterprises in accelerating the growth of economy. Its role in the country's nutritional security,
poverty alleviation and employment generation programmes is becoming increasingly
important. It offers not only a wide range of options to the farmers for crop diversification,
but also provides ample scope for sustaining large number of agro industries which generate
huge employment opportunities.

Ministry of Agriculture has been implementing various programmes and schemes

towards the development of horticulture, under the scheme of Mission for Integrated
Development of Horticulture (MIDH). However, there is still a lot of scope in harnessing the
potential of the horticulture sector. One of the key areas to be looked into is developing
a very accurate and standard inventory system for horticulture crops and practices. As the
majority of horticultural crops are grown as part of the homestead, it is difficult to collect
timely and proper statistics. Considering the fact that India is endowed a great diversity of
agro climatic zones, allowing for production of a variety of horticultural crops such as fruits,
vegetables, flowers, spices, plantation crops, root and tuber crops, medicinal and aromatic
crops. These crops being capital as well as labour intensive, there is great popential to use
modern technologies for development of horticulture.

Horticulture sector has also seen extensive use of remote sensing data.
In fact, the birth of remote sensing applications in the country was in the field of
horticulture, i.e. the conduct of an experiment aimed at early detection of coconut plantation
wilt disease (Dakshinamurty et al., 1971). There has been quite a large number of
studies/application of remote sensing data in horticulture sector, which include inventory
of crop, site suitability, post-harvest infrastructure, precision farming, disease assessment etc.
Apple plantations in Arunachal Pradesh and cultivation of grapes in large areas in Mizoram
are the example of successful use of geomatics in horticulture development and planning,
(Panigrahy and Manjunath, 2009).