Telangana takes the tech route to monitor cropping, help farmers

If you are a farmer in Telangana, an eye in the sky will be watching your land. It will keep a tab on what you grow in which season and to what extent.

Your appraisal will happen at the end of each cropping season. If you are found violating the government’s guidelines on the acreage and type of crop allowed to be grown in a particular season, you will not be eligible for “Rythu Bandhu”, a flagship welfare program of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government.

Under this scheme, all farmers in the State are given financial assistance of ₹10,000 per acre per year, spread over two equal installments covering Rabi and Kharif crop seasons.

Remote sensing technology

The government has drawn up a plan to harness remote sensing technology to monitor the cropping pattern across the state.

Using the high-resolution cameras, the authorities will be able to identify the extent of area under cultivation in each survey number, and also estimate yield using crop cutting experiment data.

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The Telangana Remote Sensing Application Centre (TRAC), an autonomous body, has been entrusted with the task of monitoring the cropping pattern.

“It will start from the coming crop season (after monsoon),” an official of the agriculture department said.

This comes close on the heels of a major policy shift unveiled by the government early this week, handing out a prescription to farmers on what crops to grow in which season and to what extent.

Though it is a normal practice for the authorities to issue advisories to farmers on what to grow in tune with the changing market demands, this is the first time that the government is making it mandatory for the farmers to stick to the regulated cropping pattern.

The compliance has been linked to “Rythu Bandhu” scheme.

“This is not persuasion but coercion. It is one thing to convince the farmers to go for those crops that have demand in the market and can fetch better profits but quite another to force them to go for only those crops specified by the government. For instance, the promotion of cotton crop will be a hazardous step because of the adverse environmental impact,” said Dr. G.V. Ramanjaneyulu, agricultural scientist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA), an NGO.

However, the government has justified the policy of regulated farming on the ground that it would make agriculture a profitable venture through scientific cultivation.

Broadly, the idea is to reduce the area under the cultivation of paddy which needs more water and encourages farmers to go for more commercial crops like cotton and pulses. A detailed calendar of crops will be released for the benefit of farmers. It will also suggest which specific paddy varieties to grow, depending on the market demand.

“Through the collection of crop data for the coming season, the TRAC will be able to demarcate the cropping pattern using remote sensing technology and identify them with different colours,” the State Agriculture Minister S.Niranjan Reddy said.

Besides being able to estimate the nature of the soil, the TRAC can suggest types of fertilisers and their quantity to be used for any crop using soil health card data.

The data to be generated from remote sensing applications would help effectively implement regulated farming in the future, he said.

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About 1.6 crore acres of cultivable land belonging to more than 70 lakh farmers will be linked to TRAC soon.

Cultivable land to go up

The cultivable land in the State is expected to increase to 1.33 lakh acres from existing 1.23 lakh acres in this Kharif season as a result of new irrigation projects being commissioned.

“Those who cultivate a paddy variety other than what the government has instructed will not get the Rythu Bandhu assistance. The government will recognise which variety of paddy is having high demand in the market so that your crop will be sold like hotcakes and gives you a profit,” the Chief Minister K.Chandrasekar Rao had said recently while unveiling the new policy on crop regulation.

The purpose of the move, he said, was to encourage farmers to produce what the market wants. Till now, farmers have been cultivating crops without any idea of the demand and supply dynamics.

Pointing out that the long-staple variety of cotton, cultivated in Telangana and Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, has a huge demand in the international market, he wanted the farmers to go for cotton crop in 40 lakh acres.

Similarly, KCR advised the farmers to cultivate red grams over an extent of 15 lakh acres, instead of maize which has no demand.

However, some agricultural experts disagreed with the new policy, saying monoculture would not be feasible for farmers, besides having an adverse environmental impact.

“Cotton crop is water-intensive and environmentally hazardous. Besides, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the cotton market. The rate of suicide is high among cotton farmers,” Dr. Ramanjaneyulu said.

Free power to the farm sector has already led to a sharp decline in groundwater levels as more farmers opt for deeper bore wells to irrigate their fields. The experts have warned that this would lead to a decline in soil health as well.

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The farmers are unwilling to take up the cultivation of fine varieties of paddy because they have a long duration, low yield, and low disease resistance. “Instead, the government must promote paddy varieties that have a short duration, low water consumption, and are disease-resistant,” Ramanjaneyulu said.

Since Telangana imports nearly half of its requirement of vegetables from other states, there is scope for increasing the cultivation of vegetables to nearly 10 lakh acres, he argued.