1.78 lakh farmers from 1,626 panchayats attend orientation programme in J&K

Jammu, Jun 1 (PTI) At least 1.78 lakh farmers from 1,626 panchayats of Jammu and Kashmir took part in an orientation programme which has been organised in six rounds to create awareness about various agricultural schemes of the government, officials said.

The ‘Kisan Sampark Abhiyan’ has been rolled out under the Holistic Agriculture Development Plan (HADP) with 29 proposed projects with an outlay of Rs 5,012 crore to be implemented in the next five years.

The latest round, which was conducted from 29th May to 31st May, saw massive participation of farmers.

“A total of 1.78 lakh farmers have participated in the orientation programme under the Kisan Samapark Abhiyan during the six rounds of the programme which began from 24th April,” Additional Chief Secretary Agriculture Production department (ADP) Atal Dulloo said.

He said that it saw massive participation of farmers.

“The programme has covered a total of 1,626 panchayats in six rounds conducted so far. The department in J&K is currently engaged in a first of its kind, ground breaking, extensive farmer orientation exercise,” he said.

Under the mission, ambitious goals have been set for reaching out to every farmer in every panchayat of the Union Territory within the next four months, he said.

“The exercise started on April 24 and will last until August 31, 2023 and has been planned under HADP, a turnaround programme which has been approved in agriculture sector by the government recently,” Dulloo said.

He said that specially trained resource persons are capturing the data of farmers and till date the data of around 1.67 lakh farmers has been captured using the IT tools.

“Analytics of the baseline survey data are being developed for prospective planning in the agriculture sector in the UT,” he said.

Dulloo said that such an exercise is expected to have long-term gains as it is for the first time that real-time data is being used to assess problems in agriculture sector.

The government has released a calendar that is specific to each district. Officials from the agriculture, animal sheep husbandry, horticulture, sericulture, and fisheries departments, who were trained in advance during the 641 training sessions that were held throughout all districts from January to April are acting as the resource persons for the orientation programme.

“A creative method has been implemented to use short films and videos to describe the various initiatives and projects. The farmers will be shown a total of 49 short films and videos about HADP and other centrally supported programmes at various locations in J&K,” he added.