Telangana mulls roping in RSA to implement new agriculture policy: Niranjan Reddy

Hyderabad: Agriculture Department wants to deploy Remote Sensing Applications as part of implementing its new Agriculture Policy of regulated agricultural farming in the State.

As part of this, the Agriculture department wants to rope in the Telangana State Remote Sensing Application Centre (TRAC) to deliver various services to the government and the farmers for systematic implementation of the new Agriculture Policy.

Agriculture Minister S Niranjana Reddy said that the Remote Sensing Applications (RSA) would help in recording crop-wise detail from the agriculture season in the State.

He said the State government wants to bring agriculture on tracks to make it profitable to the farmers and asking them to adopt cultivation practices in a scientific manner and crops which are in demand and fetch fair prices to their agricultural produce.

He said that the RSA deployment would help in identifying each crop with a specific colour. Besides, it can identify the extent of each crop in a given survey number.

Further, it can also analyse the health of different soils and in turn, linking the soil testing results to the RSA will yield data prescribing the number of fertilizers that the farmers will have to use for their crops.

Similarly, linking the RSA with the crop cutting data on the experiment shows that it is capable of providing the total crop production with 95 per cent accuracy, he added.

The Agriculture Minister said that there are more than 56 lakh farmer households in the State with a cultivable land of about 1.60 crore acres. The RSA deployment would help in prescribing the amount of fertilizer per each acre, based on the variety of the soil and agricultural season.

Against this backdrop, the Agriculture department has decided to link up its field data collected during every agricultural season.

For this, the Minister held talks with the TRAC, Additional Director General Srinivas Reddy and asked the TRAC to prepare a comprehensive report on the deployment of RAC for implementing the comprehensive Agricultural Policy unveiled by the State government.

He said that exercise has begun and a full report on the subject will be handed over to Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, he added.