According to the government, at least 29 projects, approved by Apex Committee for Holistic Development of Agriculture and Allied sectors, are being implemented in Jammu and Kashmir.
The plan worth Rs 5013 crores is tipped to bring a significant change in the lives of the huge population linked with the farming sector in J&K.
Lately, the government has put a lot of focus on agriculture and the allied sector. In fact, the Lieutenant Governor said that this decade in the agriculture and horticulture sector belongs to J&K. He also said that policies through ‘holistic development’ plan have laid the foundations for a ‘sea change’ in the economic growth of J&K.
The government recently stressed that its effort is to make sub-tropical fruit cultivation a multi-faceted business by increasing efficiency of orchards with the help of various interventions like setting up new nurseries and new plant material testing labs.
Recently also, the government introduced Agristack, a collection of technologies and digital databases proposed by the Central Government which focuses on farmers and the agricultural sector.
In order to create Agristack, the central agriculture department finalized the core concept of “India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA)” which lays down a framework for Agristack.
Earlier the J&K government came up with the Aapki Zamin Aapki Nigrani concept towards transparency and digitization of land records. The Chief Secretary said that J&K would complete the digitization of cadastral maps and thereafter the Geo-referencing of the same for better implementation of Agristack.
The Agristack is tipped to become a basic tool of introduction of modern practices and is expected to give “extraordinary” results in terms of both the quality and quantity of the agriculture produce. It shall provide a unique ID to every farmer on one hand and information related to farm land on other.
The government of late has made endeavor to provide end to end digitization to farmers so that they do not have to look for different services and solutions at multiple places. The 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.
All the measures needed to be taken to make farming a highly remunerative and gainful profession.
The administration should also provide technology support to confront weather vagaries. More tools than ever are available to mitigate the vagaries of nature and the government must work in making them available to the farmers.