Today, Punjab and Haryana farmers use similar tactics to evade farm fire detection Dr APJ Abdul Kalam mastered satellite evasion for Pokhran’s atomic tests.
The latest sign of this challenge is the launch of Fire Watch, a new multi-satellite monitoring platform developed by the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology (iFOREST). The platform has been designed as traditional fire-counting methods are missing a substantial part of the picture. “To design effective interventions, we need to know not only how many fires are detected, but also where and when burning takes place and how much land is affected. Fire Watch brings these data together to make better information available to policymakers and the public. Current operational monitoring relies primarily on four polar-orbiting Earth observation satellites. Unlike polar-orbiting satellites that make only periodic visits overhead, these geostationary satellites observe the same region repeatedly, generating imagery approximately every fifteen minutes. The Committee noted significant diurnal observation gaps and urged the Department of Space to prioritise development of a geostationary satellite capable of round-the-clock fire monitoring. Many scientists argue that this issue deserves careful reconsideration.
In May 1998, under the leadership of scientists including Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, India conducted the Shakti series of five nuclear tests at Pokhran in Rajasthan while successfully concealing crucial preparations from some of the most sophisticated American spy satellites in orbit. These include NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors flying aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites, and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite or VIIRS sensors carried on the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. The platform integrates data from MODIS and VIIRS for active fire detection, while adding observations from Meteosat-8 and Meteosat-9 carrying the SEVIRI instrument. A 2026 Parliamentary Standing Committee recently observed that, despite India’s achievements as a leading space power, the country continues to rely heavily on foreign satellite systems for monitoring forest fires and similar environmental events. If satellite observations can aid pollution control, they argue, then at least part of such EOS 5 satellite data should be made available for civilian environmental applications.
