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Efficient discrimination of diverse kharif crops, remains crucial for crop monitoring and production forecasting, and plays a pivotal role in decision-making for food security in India. This study aims to harness temporal backscatter data from EOS-04 C-band synthetic aperture data (SAR) payload to achieve precise discrimination among six short-duration (cereal, oilseeds, fibre) and long-duration (fibre, pulses) kharif crops. The study integrates limited ground-truth polygons and a Random Forest machine learning approach for analysing EOS-04 time-series data. The classification accuracies were found to be higher than 75% across all kharif crops, with cereals exhibiting the highest accuracy, succeeded by fibre, oilseed and pulse crops. A key focus lies in identifying optimal polarization combinations for effective discrimination among diverse kharif crop types. The study reveals that the synergistic utilization of dual polarizations outperforms individual co- or cross-polarizations, notably benefiting discrimination of cotton, soybean and groundnut crops. Horizontal–vertical polarizations are found to be most effective for achieving peak accuracies in rice and red gram crops. Furthermore, the analysis indicates a promising potential for early crop assessment, presenting an opportunity to furnish precise crop estimates at least one and a half months before the harvest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]