 Hello everyone, welcome to the NPTEL course on Remote Sensing and GIS for Rural Development. This is Professor Penan Chinnasamy and I am with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. I work at the center called Center for Technology Alternators for Rural Areas, SITARA, which is a center focused mostly on rural development. We also work on the people's issues that focuses on the bottom of the pyramid and we work on development for their livelihoods. So, this course is very focused on how to improve the rural development using remote sensing and GIS. As all of you know, India is still an agrarian nation, which means most of the livelihood is still dependent on rural entities. Due to climate change and anthropogenic impacts, the rural regions are facing lot of stresses and because of this, they have loss of livelihood which results in less development. In such cases, we need to understand what are the different stresses for rural development, how climate and anthropogenic activities are impacting rural development. However, we do not have the observation data to study all these. Observation data is very expensive, time consuming and sometimes have sensitivities. To cater to that, this course focuses on using remote sensing and GIS platforms. Remote sensing is the technology where you collect data from an object without disturbing or touching it. And to process the remote sensing, you need a platform and that is where GIS comes in. There are multiple courses on the introduction to remote sensing and GIS in NPTEL. Please go through them for as a preparation to this class because here we will be using it focusing on the rural development. We will be identifying data, remote sensing, satellite, drone, etcetera, how to process it for understanding rural development and create indicators or maps that help for rural development. Also, we will be collecting data that will support the understanding of rural issues and lead to better rural development scenarios. This course is important for government agencies and those preparing for government agencies. Also important for CSR activities, PSUs and other agencies that focus on rural development. Even small scale industries that focus on rural development, they would need to know and understand the rural resources and without data, this remote sensing and GIS can help immensely. With this, I welcome you all to this NPTEL course. Thank you.