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India's first digital soil texture map was released on 16 July 2026 at the 98th Foundation Day of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.
It was developed by ICAR-NBSS&LUP, Nagpur, and released by Union Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
The map carries digitised soil texture data at one-hectare resolution across the country.
It was built by combining field soil survey with remote sensing, satellite imagery and artificial intelligence-based classification.
Its intended uses are crop suitability mapping, irrigation planning, soil classification and village-level land-use planning.
Soil texture is the relative proportion of three mineral particle sizes in a soil - sand, silt and clay. It is not about fertility or nutrients but about physical behaviour, and it governs how fast water drains, how much moisture the soil can hold, how well air reaches the roots and how easily the soil can be tilled. A sandy soil drains quickly and dries out fast; a clayey soil holds much more water but drains poorly and can waterlog. Because texture is a stable physical property that barely changes over a farmer's lifetime, a texture map is a permanent planning layer in a way that a nutrient map, which changes season to season, is not.
Simple Analogy: Texture is to soil what the weave is to cloth - it decides how water passes through, and no amount of adding fertiliser changes it.
Soil health cards report nutrient status, which changes with cropping and fertiliser use; the texture map reports a stable physical property. The two are complementary layers, not substitutes.
Plot-level decisions on crop choice, irrigation and input use depend on data at plot-level resolution - which is exactly what a hectare-scale map provides.
Alluvial, black (regur), red, laterite, arid, forest and peaty soils are the standard classification; texture cuts across it as the physical description of any of them.
The map is an example of satellite data plus AI being used to build a national resource inventory, alongside applications such as crop area estimation and land-use change detection.
GS Paper 1 > Geography - soils of India; GS Paper 3 > Agriculture and technology missions
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In which of the following activities are Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites used? 1. Assessment of crop productivity 2. Locating groundwater resources 3. Mineral exploration 4. Telecommunications 5. Traffic studies Select the correct answer using the code given below.
Answer: 1, 2 and 3 only
For the measurement/estimation of which of the following are satellite images/remote sensing data used? 1. Chlorophyll content in the vegetation of a specific location 2. Greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies of a specific location 3. Land surface temperatures of a specific location Select the correct answer using the code given below.
Answer: 1, 2 and 3
The relative proportion of sand, silt and clay in a soil, which determines drainage, water-holding capacity and aeration.
National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, an ICAR institute at Nagpur established in 1976.
Farming in which inputs and practices are matched to the conditions of a specific plot rather than applied uniformly across a region.
Collecting information about the Earth's surface from satellite or airborne sensors without physical contact.