Stressing on providing better agricultural marketing practises in the state including digital intervention as a remedy towards plaques affecting the agricultural marketing scenario in the country, Deputy Chief Minister and Agriculture Minister Vijai Sardesai outlined his vision to provide better market facilities and infrastructure to common Goan farmers as part of the state government’s efforts to realize the Prime Ministers vision of doubling farmers income by 2022.
Speaking at the National Conference of The All India Agricultural Marketing Board Federation currently underway at the Royal Orchid Hotel in Majorda, Sardesai stressed on providing organic and safe food to the people of Goa by encouraging the farmers to go organic. If this happens, the government would create a brand Goa to market local produce and handicrafts through standardization and high quality sale of products said Sardesai.
Sardesai committed to providing better procurement centres with better logistics and also including cold chain to maintain quality of the produce so as to provide farmers better profitability and providing goans safer food. Sardesai also shared his idea of wanting to use digital technology in providing an e-commerce platform to the local farmers to allow direct sale of products from farm to kitchen.
Sardesai informed that his idea of developing an Agricloud, a digital platform for management of entire agrarian activities in the state will be tendered in the next fortnight. All formalities for tendering the work have been cleared including a go ahead from the IT Department he added. The Agricloud is a platform that will organise the entire agriculture activity in the state with a 3 way interface that will allow the department to register farmers and keep track of all subsidies and inputs provided. It will also allow these farmers to make informed decisions through customized information related to their needs. The farmer can access a variety of informative modules including agricultural advisory, weather, market prices, agriculture information library in the form of text, imagery, audio and videos in the selected language at profiling stage. It will eventually also create an e-commerce platform to allow the farmers to sell their produce directly to customers. Sardesai said that digital intervention in the agriculture sector will help in ensuring and realizing the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of doubling farmers income by 2022.
