How satellite survey glitch has left 80,000 Gujarat groundnut farmers in the lurch

A technical glitch in Gujarat’s ambitious satellite survey of crops and digitised farmer registration system has thrown thousands of groundnut farmers into panic. In North Gujarat and the Saurashtra region, satellite imagery failed to detect groundnut crops that were ready for harvest, leading the Agriculture, Farmers Welfare and Co-operation Department to abruptly cancel registrations for availing the Minimum Support Price (MSP).

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The department issued a notification on September 16, announcing the cancellation of registrations of around 80,000 farmers after satellite images reportedly showed no crops on their fields. Following this, affected farmers also received individual messages informing them that their registrations had been cancelled.

No cause for worry, says dept

“This year, registrations for MSP procurement are being verified through a digital crop survey using satellite imagery. During this process, about 10 percent of the registered farmers were found to have no groundnut crop in their survey numbers, leading to cancellation. In addition to the notification, the concerned farmers were also informed via SMS,” explained Anju Sharma, additional chief secretary of the department.

“However, farmers need not worry or panic. The cancellations were the result of a technical glitch during the digital survey. Any farmer who has cultivated groundnut this season but still received such an SMS should approach the Gram Sevak for re-registration. The Director of Agriculture office has already shared the list of such survey numbers with district authorities to monitor the process,” she told The Federal.

Apart from the cancellations, some villages in the Rajkot district did not show up in the satellite survey at all. “The registration of farmers from Kankot, Ramnagar, Vagudad and Juna Pipaliya remains pending. We have urged them to visit the Gram Sevak and complete the process at the earliest. MSP procurement will only be possible after the required verification,” said Triptiben Patel, Rajkot District Agricultural Officer.

Digital push fails farmers

The Gujarat government rolled out a full-scale digital crop survey this year after conducting pilot tests in villages across Aravalli, Mehsana, Narmada, Dang, Valsad and Porbandar during 2023–24.

Farmers’ groups say the digital survey has backfired. “So far, it has proven to be a complete failure and has only harassed farmers. Alongside groundnut, we also sow castor in the same fields, using a method called antarpat, where castor is planted between two rows of groundnut. Castor grows up to 3–3.5 feet, while groundnut barely reaches a foot. For example, the ‘39’ variety of groundnut grows only about nine inches. Earlier, the Gram Sevak inspected the fields in person, so there was no confusion in identifying groundnut among taller crops. But in the digital survey, the satellite cameras only captured the castor plants, ignoring the groundnut crop,” explained Dayabhai Gajera, president of the Gujarat chapter of the All India Kisan Sabha, a farmers’ rights organisation based in Rajkot.

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“It is the government’s mistake, but we are the ones suffering. We have to go through the registration process again when it is time to harvest the groundnut,” lamented Bhimabhai Dabhi, a farmer from Jasdan taluka in Rajkot.

Registration woes pile up

The push for digitisation in Gujarat’s farm sector began in 2024, when Union Home Minister Amit Shah launched the e-Samridhi portal to register tur dal farmers for MSP procurement. The facility was later extended to growers of groundnut, soybean, urad (black gram) and moong (green gram).

At that stage, however, verification was still carried out manually. The talati (village revenue officer) or gram sevak would visit fields regularly and submit weekly updates on crops sown by farmers to the District Agricultural Officer. These records were then forwarded to the state’s Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Department for verification during the registration process, culminating in a final survey before harvest.

“The government’s digital shift has created more hurdles for farmers than benefits. Earlier, they would simply take their harvest to the local Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) and register there. Now, they still have to queue up, this time at the gram panchayat office with documents to register on the e-Samridhi portal. The government initially expected farmers to handle the online registration themselves, but most are either illiterate or don’t have access to smartphones. Eventually, the state hired a local person in each village to manage the process from the gram panchayat office. Each village was given a unique ID and password, and the appointed operator is paid ₹50 per farmer registered,” said Sagar Rabari, a farmers’ rights activist and AAP member, speaking to The Federal.

“The digitised crop survey has only added to farmers’ troubles. With the registration deadline set for September 22, nearly 80,000 farmers must complete the process before then or risk losing their eligibility for MSP,” he added.

Old glitches, new worries

“The Gujarat government has experimented with digital surveys before, and failed. Between 2012 and 2018, it undertook a state-wide digital resurvey of land under the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP). The initiative was first piloted in 2,742 villages between 2009 and 2012, and later rolled out by then Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Nine private agencies were contracted to conduct the resurvey, but instead of updating land records, they relied on survey numbers from as far back as 1920. This created new digital records riddled with errors. When farmers began complaining, the project was abruptly scrapped in August 2018. Many farmers who were assigned incorrect survey numbers are still running from office to office to get them corrected,” said Palbhai Ambaliya, a Jamnagar-based farmer and chairman of the Gujarat Kisan Congress.

“In India, digital surveys for government departments are typically carried out by the Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics (BISAG-N), an autonomous body registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. BISAG-N assists central and state governments with satellite-based assessments such as flood damage, road mapping, forest cover, and land surveys. However, the land resurvey conducted in Gujarat between 2012 and 2018 was not handled by BISAG-N; it was outsourced to nine private agencies. The state government has so far not clarified whether the recent satellite-based crop survey was conducted through BISAG-N or outsourced again. In any case, all agencies in India ultimately source their satellite data from the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), which functions under ISRO,” said Krishnakant Chauhan, a member of the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, an environmental activists’ collective based in Gujarat.

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“The problem lies in the technology itself; it relies on colour recognition, which often leads to errors. For instance, when BISAG-N carried out a forest survey of Gujarat in 2023, it wrongly classified shrubs, mango orchards in South Gujarat, and even sugarcane fields as forest land, simply because the satellite registered them all as green, without distinguishing shape or size. Our research also showed that the technology fails to recognise multi-cropping or mixed vegetation on the same plot. We had raised these concerns with the Gujarat government after the forest survey results proved to be flawed,” Chauhan said.