Owing to its severe effect on productivity of rain-fed crops and indirect effect on employment as well as per capita income, agricultural drought has become a prime concern worldwide. The occurrence of drought is mainly a climatic phenomenon which cannot be eliminated. However, its effects can be reduced if actual spatio-temporal information related to crop status is available to the decision makers. The present study attempts to assess the efficiency of remote sensing and GIS techniques for monitoring the spatio-temporal extent of agricultural drought. In the present study, NOAA-AVHRR NDVI data were used for monitoring agricultural drought through NDVI based Vegetation Condition Index. VCI was calculated for whole Rajasthan using the long term NDVI images which reveals the occurrence of drought related crop stress during the year 2002. The VCI values of normal (2003) and drought (2002) year were compared with meteorological based Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Rainfall Anomaly Index and Yield Anomaly Index and a good agreement was found among them. The correlation coefficient between VCI and yield of major rain-fed crops (r>0.75) also supports the efficiency of this remote sensing derived index for assessing agricultural drought

In the present study, prediction of agricultural drought has been addressed through prediction of agricultural yield using a model based on NDVI-SPI. It has been observed that the meteorological drought index SPI with different timescale is correlated with NDVI at different lag. Also NDVI of current fortnight is correlated with NDVI of previous lags. Based on the correlation coefficients, the Multiple Regression Model was developed to predict NDVI. The NDVI of current fortnight was found highly correlated with SPI of previous fortnight in semi-arid and transitional zones. The correlation between NDVI and crop yield was observed highest in first fortnight of August. The RMSE of predicted yield in drought year was found to be about 17.07 kg/ha which was about 6.02 per cent of average yield. In normal year, it was 24 kg/Ha denoting about 2.1 per cent of average yield.