Precision agriculture: Is India lagging behind?

Variations in the soil and the environment have been known to human race since they started to manage their land. The soil is variable and so as the soils parent material, landscape, micro climate, previous uses. Hence crop development, disease, yield and its quality also varies spatially. Precision agriculture involves addressing soil and field variations with a view to optimizing agricultural practices using tools and technologies such as GNSS and GIS. It originated in the 1980s and optimizes the benefits for sustainable productivity growth, which is so crucial when Indian agriculture is going through structural transformation. Its composition has shifted from traditional food grains to high-valued commercial products. The emerging IT revolution has encouraged farm sector of India to adopt Precision Agriculture technique as applied mostly in the developed countries.