By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, September 5, 2019: In a far reaching move to boost agrarian growth in the state, Odisha government aims to promote the use of IoT (internet of things) sensors to keep the real-time check on the supply and consumption of inputs like seeds, fertilizers and pesticides etc.

The move is primarily targeted to increase the quality of farming and farming products, the draft Agricultural Policy of Odisha 2019 indicates. The draft policy which will replace the old policy of 2013 and aims at continuous growth in farmer incomes, making the growth process inclusive of small and marginal farmers and ensuring sustainable, stable and scalable agricultural growth.

State’s first agricultural policy in 1996 and subsequent policies were announced in 2008 and 2013.

In the new policy, the government proposes to take up measures for setting up technology system for automated grading and sorting of crops using robotics and machine vision. It will reduce efforts and wastage in the supply chain, officials said.

Besides, the state government is all set to use the new age technologies like block chain to support the implementation of contract farming.

“The analysis of the data from various sources will be used in activities like creating agro-advisory, monitoring the situation in the remote areas, crop cutting experiment etc. The data would also be used to help the farmers avail crop insurance and credit that are rightly priced”, the draft policy said hinting at the use of drones for remote monitoring, procurement of high-resolution satellite imagery, weather analysis from Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) as well through private partnerships.

The proposed policy also facilitate the usage of the data by the officials of the government at the state, district, block, gram panchayat (GP) and village level under the ADAPT (Analytics for Decision-making and Agricultural Policy Transformation) program which will be an integrated platform for all the relevant database in the agriculture department for the purpose of effective management of the activities carried out by the department.

“The platform will also enable the usage of the data by the officials of the government at the state, district, block, gram panchayat (GP) and village level. The platform would also be available on mobile for easy access by the officials”, the policy added.

The state government will set up a project management unit (PMU) and data science team for managing the technology operations and promote the usage of data.