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In India, agriculture serves as the backbone of the economy, and is a primary source of employment. Despite the setbacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the agriculture and allied sectors in India exhibited resilience, registered a growth of 3.4% during 2020–2121, even as the overall economic growth declined by 7.2% during the same period. The improvement of the agriculture sector holds paramount importance in sustaining the increasing population and safeguarding food security. Consequently, researchers worldwide have been concentrating on digitally transforming agriculture by leveraging advanced technologies to establish smart, sustainable, and lucrative farming systems. The advancement in remote sensing (RS) and machine learning (ML) has proven beneficial for farmers and policymakers in minimizing crop losses and optimizing resource utilization through valuable crop insights. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of studies dedicated to the application of RS and ML in addressing agriculture-related challenges in India. We conducted a systematic literature review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and evaluated research articles published from 2015 to 2022. The objective of this study is to shed light on the application of both RS and ML technique across key agricultural domains, encompassing "crop management", "soil management", and "water management, ultimately leading to their improvement. This study primarily focuses on assessing the current status of using intelligent geospatial data analytics in Indian agriculture. Majority of the studies were carried out in the crop management category, where the deployment of various RS sensors led yielded substantial improvements in agricultural monitoring. The integration of remote sensing technology and machine learning techniques can enable an intelligent approach to agricultural monitoring, thereby providing valuable recommendations and insights for effective agricultural management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centella asiatica is well known for its miraculous therapeutic properties in various systems of traditional medicine across the world. However, significant variation in its pharmacological activities has been reported due to the unavailability of quality raw material and non-standardized formulations. A number of research papers have been published on the collection of C. asiatica plants from different regions for the identification of a suitable agroclimate with elite germplasms. Efforts have been made to standardize production and post-harvest practices for the availability of quality raw material with a high centelloside content. The ecological niche modeling approach revealed that the Indian subcontinent has high climatic suitability for the production of C. asiatica, and genotypes with a high content of centelloside were predominantly found in the Western Ghats, North East, Eastern Himalaya and Western Himalaya in India. Open cultivation of C. asiatica is more suitable in these agroclimatic zones in India. Cultivation under shade is also suitable in the plains of Central India. Hydroponic and tissue culture of C. asiatica has also been successfully established for the enhanced production of centelloside using supplements and elicitors such as sucrose, auxins, cytokinins, kinetin, methyl jasmonate, etc. Freeze drying has been identified as the most efficient post-harvest method for the high pharmacological activities of C. asiatica extracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic has hit the agriculture sector hard around the world. A study was conducted to assess the impact of the pandemic on cropping patterns, crop management, usage of chemical inputs and their organic alternatives, harvesting, and marketing avenues through a survey approach in the two states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India. A total of 250 farmers participated in the study, the data was analyzed by Chi-square test and Kruskal–Wallis test. The assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on some aspects was undertaken by dividing the study period into three phases. Though a smaller number of people were infected with COVID-19 in the initial phase of the pandemic compared to the later phases, farm operations and the procurement of inputs were significantly affected at this phase as there was a sudden disruption in transportation due to COVID-19-induced movement restrictions. During the entire study period, commodities such as rice, bananas, vegetables, coconuts, and flowers suffered maximum crop loss compared to pulses, groundnuts, cotton, and rubber. Among fertilizers, the maximum shortage was observed for chemical fertilizers (46%) and biofertilizers (30%) compared to cow dung (18%) and poultry manure (6%), indicating that farmers tended to use more local materials that could be easily procured and accessed compared to shop-based inputs. A rise in the cost of cultivation, scarcity of farm workforce, and difficulty in hiring farm machinery all have contributed to the loss of profit during the pandemic period. As a response to COVID-19, growers initiated post-harvest processing of commodities, and cropping systems remained the same during the period. The paper also discusses some remedial measures to be adopted by households in the future, to minimize the impacts of such pandemics in the agrarian sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]