ABSTRACT
Agriculture with its allied activities is the largest sector in India revealing 70% dependency of its rural households for their livelihood and has played important roles for food and nutritional security, poverty alleviation, employment generation and sustainable development. Precision Agriculture (PA) also known as precision farming, prescription farming, variable rate technology (VRT), site-specific farming (SSF), site-specific management (SSM), site-specific crop management (SSCM), is considered as the vibrant agricultural system of the 21st century, as it symbolizes a better balance between reliance on traditional knowledge as well as information and management intensive technologies. The “Green revolution” (1960s) has made our country self-sufficient in food production attributable to High Yielding Varieties (HYVs), fertilization, irrigation, pesticides and increase in cropping intensity (CI) and lastly mechanization of agriculture. The critical differences between traditional and precision faming clearly define the prospects of precision farming for sustainable development of agriculture/ horticulture in India.
