The government prepared a contingency plan for 225 districts as rabi sowing remains slack due to an uneven monsoon. ICAR is developing a dynamic dashboard to support farm advisories across India. "We are taking contingency planning to a new level," said ICAR Director General ML Jat on Friday.
ICAR is developing a dynamic dashboard integrating weather forecasts, water data and district-level information to support contingency planning and farm advisories across India
As rabi crop sowing remains slack due to an uneven monsoon, the government has prepared a contingency plan for 225 districts -- a rare occurrence during the rabi season -- while remaining hopeful that sowing will pick up over the next month and a half.
"We are taking contingency planning to a new level. We have been working on this since the last season and want to develop a dynamic dashboard. The proposed dashboard would allow users to access information at the district level. It would integrate the India Meteorological Department's (IMD) weekly forecasts, data on water bodies and other relevant information to help officials make decisions based on local conditions," Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) Director General ML Jat told reporters on Friday.
Jat said the dashboard being developed by ICAR would cover the entire country, rather than only the 225 districts identified for contingency planning.
He said the platform would not be restricted to contingency planning. It would also provide advisories for normal agricultural conditions, helping farmers and officials decide what action should be taken in different circumstances.
Work on the dashboard began as part of efforts to translate contingency plans into a more accessible and dynamic tool.
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Jat said ICAR ultimately intended to integrate the dashboard with the AgriStack initiative so that different sources of agricultural information could be brought together.
"I think it will be a very useful tool. Ultimately, we have to link it with AgriStack, because all these things need to be integrated," he said.
He said a district initially identified as vulnerable to drought could move out of that category if it received adequate rainfall in the coming days. The assessment should therefore be revised using updated IMD and rainfall data, including data for the following 15 days.
He said ICAR had also constituted a task force to examine opportunities for increasing the cultivation of oilseeds and pulses in rice-fallow areas.
He said these areas offered considerable scope for crop diversification.
"In places where residual soil moisture was insufficient for wheat, farmers could consider growing suitable oilseed and pulse crops instead," Jat said.
He also said that a separate soil health policy was expected to come in the next two to four months.
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