Remote sensing based crop insurance for jute (Corchorus olitorius) crop in India

Jute (Corchorus olitorius) is an eco-friendly commercial crop largely grown in the West Bengal state of India and is often exposed to weather risks. The existing area-yield crop insurance scheme guarantees a certain per cent of normal green biomass yield of the crop over an insured area. Lack of reliable yield data has diminished the effectiveness of this scheme. Therefore, an alternate basis for jute yield loss assessment using satellite-derived crop performance index called ‘Crop Health Factor (CHF)’ was developed and implemented as documented in this paper. Both optical and microwave data of Sentinels along with weather and field data sets were analysed to map the jute crop fields and to generate crop condition indices such as NDVI, LSWI, VH backscatter, FAPAR and rainfall derivatives for the current (2020) and past years (2017, 2018 and 2019). The metrics derived from these indices were subjected to entropy analysis to produce the CHF values for different insurance units, which were found to be well correlated with yield. CHF data was used in place of yield for assessing crop loss and insurance pay-outs. This project has implications for developing transformative and parametric crop insurance solutions harnessing the potential of remote sensing data.