The Hindu : Kerala News : `Satellite images can locate ganja plantations'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jan 10, 2005

Kerala

Kerala

`Satellite images can locate ganja plantations'

By Our Staff Reporter

PALAKKAD, JAN. 9. Two scientists from the Centre for Advanced Computation Technology, under the Indian Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad, who made imagery studies of five illegal ganja plantations in the remote areas of the Anavai and Singanpara forests in Attappady Hills on January 8 and 9, are hopeful of identifying ganja plantations in deep forests using remote sensing technology.

According to Forest officials who made arrangements to take J. Sai Baba, head of the Division of Geophysical Information System attached to the Agency, and his colleague to remote forests to conduct the study, encouraging results in identifying the ganja plantations have emerged.

Through remote sensing, a plot of six metres long and 6 metres wide in which ganja is cultivated could be identified. It will be difficult to identify smaller plots, the officials said.

The scientists took the longitude and latitude identifications in the Attappady forests, where the ganja plots are located. They used spectral signature for the unique identification of the spectrum that would help the location of ganja plantations even in deep and inaccessible forest tracts.

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