SRINAGAR: Chief Secretary, Dr Arun Kumar Mehta, today maintained that the soon-to-be-launched J&K Agriculture Mission and the 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.
The Chief Secretary observed that the Agristack is a technology-based information system with huge potential for the 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 toward transparency and digitization of land records. He made out that in the 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 for introduction of modern practices and can give us extraordinary results in terms of both the quality and quantity of our agricultural produce. It shall provide a unique ID to every farmer on one hand and information related to farmland on the 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, and farm practices guided by modern technology and techniques besides the use of high-yielding varieties of agricultural inputs can fructify the dream of doubling the farmer’s income in near future.
The Chief Secretary further said that a dynamic database of all the farmers and their land holdings, 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 a major boon for the farmers. He asked for taking all the measures to make farming a 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 greater ease and transparency.
Also, the meeting discussed the basic building blocks for Agristack which include a farmers’ database with dynamic linking of land records, Geo referencing of village maps, and GIS-based real-time crop surveys in the 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 the 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.
