With national and international aid efforts underway to provide social protections and food support to families below the poverty line in some of India’s poorest states, government organizations like Odisha’s Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department needed to find a way to ensure its citizens were getting the food support they needed – and that starts at the ground level.

But there can be discrepancies between what’s reported – whether that’s rice paddy crop production like in the Odisha case, harvested forests in New Zealand, or an unclear sense of disaster damage in the Pacific Islands – and what can be seen from space. In this four-part series about getting to ground truth, we’ll explore why civil governments are increasingly turning to Planet’s satellite data to help them better understand and verify what’s happening on the ground so they can make the best decisions to support their citizens, as well as what the larger opportunity for earth observation data in Asia can look like.

Agriculture: seasonal rice paddy crop analysis to mitigate food insecurity

In addition to providing food grains and other essential items to its citizens, another responsibility of the Odisha government’s Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Department is to investigate and end false or inflated claims during the registration and procurement process of adding farms to their network and ensuring genuine farmers receive a minimum support price (MSP) or profit for the crops they produce. The...

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