Farmers in Andhra Pradesh can now get their soil testing reports from Government-run laboratories on their mobiles. Also, recommendations on what type of fertilisers would suit the soil would appear on the devices in simple Telugu.
Earlier, this would take several days for the farmers, involving visits to laboratories and sifting through stacks of reports to find their papers.
The State Government on Saturday launched a new mobile technology platform to help farmers increase output and save costs. As part of this initiative, it unveiled a slew of IT-enabled services for the farmers, covering areas of farm mechanisation, soil test-based fertiliser recommendations and online licence management system.
The State Agriculture Minister Kanna Laxminarayana, who launched the services, said this has drawn appreciation at the national level and would be replicated by the Centre in other States.
Carefully developed Initially, this covers 31 different services, including insurance enquiries. “The suite of services will be slowly expanded. It has taken several months for us to develop this platform, especially as we wanted the SMS messages to be sent in Telugu,” K Madhusudhana Rao, Commissioner of Agriculture, said.
Explaining how the process worked, he said the farmer can first apply online for the services from the nearest mee seva centre or the neighbourhood Internet centres. “After the application is submitted by the farmer, it comes to the department for further processing. Once the applications are registered, farmers will be allotted unique identification numbers,” he pointed out.
As part of the services, an application has been developed to send soil test-based fertiliser recommendations to farmers through SMS after the soil test results are made online. A pilot programme has been taken up in Rangareddy, Medak and Krishna districts and will later be extended to other districts.
The services include an online license management system for dealers, who can now apply for licenses online for marketing seeds and pesticides.
The State is likely to end the current fiscal with a food grain production of 207 lakh tonnes, groundnut 11 lakh tonnes and 52 lakh bales of cotton. These are slightly below the target because of the three cyclones and heavy rains that struck the State before the season.