Srinagar : Chief Secretary, Dr Arun Kumar Mehta today maintained that the soon to be launched J&K Agriculture Mission and ongoing Government of India scheme Digital Agriculture Mission (Agristack) will complement each other in revolutionizing the Agriculture sector in the UT.
He made these remarks while chairing the High Level Meeting to take stock of the implementation of the mission here.
Chief Knowledge Officer & Advisor, Ministry of Agriculture, GoI; Additional Chief Secretary Agriculture Production Department; Commissioner Secretaries of Forest, Ecology & Environment, Revenue Department, Information Technology & Information Departments; Secretary in Agriculture Department; Director Ecology, Environment & Remote Sensing; Director Agriculture Production &Farmers’ Welfare Jammu/Kashmir and other concerned officers attended the meeting in person and through online mode.
The Chief Secretary observed that the Agristack is a technology based information system with huge potential for farming sector which is the future of J&K covering nearly 70% of our population directly or indirectly. He stated that Aapki Zamin Aapki Nigrani was an earnest step taken by the UT administration towards transparency and digitization of land records. He made out that in coming months J&K would complete the digitization of cadastral maps and thereafter the Geo-referencing of the same for better implementation of Agristack.
He also reiterated that the Agriculture Mission shall revolutionize the Agricultural GDP upwards by adding Rs 28000 Cr per annum. He further said that the field functionaries of the revenue department are going to be provided with IT gadgets for keeping the records updated and their digitization.
Dr Mehta stated that the Agristack will become a basic tool of introduction of modern practices and can give us extraordinary results in terms of both the quality and quantity of our agriculture produce. It shall provide unique ID to every farmer on one hand and information related to farm land on other.
The Chief Secretary emphasised that our endeavor should be to provide end to end digitization to farmers so that they do not have to look for different services and solutions at multiple places. He observed that different interventions like digitization of land records, availability of expert opinions, farm practices guided by modern technology and techniques besides use of high yielding varieties of agricultural inputs can fructify the dream of doubling the farmers income in near future.
The Chief Secretary further said that a dynamic database of all the farmers and their land holding, crop, soil and other relevant records will be part of this task. He remarked that such a provision can easily be achieved under Agristack, thereby becoming major boon for the farmers. He asked for taking all the measures to make farming highly remunerative and gainful profession.
The Chief Knowledge Officer gave out the broad counters of the Agristack Mission. While discussing the potential benefits of the mission, it was informed that it would provide agriculture information & services, financial services, besides weather forecasts, knowledge sharing among farmers, transactional and access to government policies with grater ease and transparency.
Also, the meeting discussed the basic building blocks for Agristack which include farmers’ database with dynamic linking of land records, Geo referencing of village maps and GIS based real time crop surveys in future.
The ACS, Agriculture revealed that a core group of all the allied departments has been constituted to implement and resolve all the issues pertaining to the Mission. He also reiterated that farmer and Agriculture Department as stakeholders, Revenue Department, Ecology, Environment & Remote Sensing, SKAUST and Meteorological Department, Financial Institutions, Insurance Companies and National informatics Centre/Software Companies will also be key players for the successful implementation of Agristack in the UT. (GNS)
