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CM prods officials for farm growth push
The Telangana government proposes to adopt ‘crop colonies’ concept to help small farmers and make agriculture a profitable profession from next year. Addressing a conference of Agricultural Extension Officers (AEOs) ‘Rytuhita’ on Tuesday, Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao called upon the AEOs to play a major role in this and gave them an action plan and asked them to submit a report by June 10.
Exhorts AEOs to play a major role in boosting agriculture and to help farmers turn it profitable from next year
Hyderabad: The Telangana government proposes to adopt ‘crop colonies’ concept to help small farmers and make agriculture a profitable profession from next year. Addressing a conference of Agricultural Extension Officers (AEOs) ‘Rytuhita’ on Tuesday, Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao called upon the AEOs to play a major role in this and gave them an action plan and asked them to submit a report by June 10.
Stating that the government would empower the AEOs with high powered laptops, interest-free loans for vehicles and would also immediately appoint another 500 AEOs, the Chief Minister said henceforth the AEOs should be in the field and take up intensive surveys on various aspects in the areas under their jurisdiction.
The Chief Minister said each AEO would have 5,000 acres under his jurisdiction. It will be their responsibility to go round the villages and gather details of number of revenue villages, land under agriculture as per original revenue records and also find out if any land has been taken away for developmental purposes like canals, highway construction, industry or if it has been converted for real estate purposes.
This information should be farmer specific. AEOs should find out the name of farmers including their surnames, the land they had to forego, survey numbers, addresses and mobile numbers and the crops they used to grow. All this information should be uploaded on a day-to-day basis. In addition, he said they should also gather full information about the equipment available with the farmers under their jurisdiction and assess what more was required.
He said the survey should also include information about what crop would be advantageous where. Based on this, the government would create crop colonies. The Chief Minister asked the AEOs to complete this survey by June 10.
Chandrashekar Rao said the officers should constantly interact with the farmers and if they found that there were some problems that needed to be addressed like withering of crops or some pests, they should immediately take pictures and send them to senior officials so that the department could take immediate measures to save the crop from damage.
He said once this survey was over, AEOs should see that Gram Rytu Sangham, Mandal Rytu Samakhya, District Rytu Samakhya and State level Rytu Samakhya were set up. He said in the next budget, the government would earmark Rs 500 crore as seed money for the State-level body. The Chief Minister said it would be the responsibility of the district Rytu Samakhya to test moisture content in the produce, talk to dealers and fix minimum price so that the farmers did not get cheated by middlemen.
