Web portals for farmers

The Government of India has recently launched three portals namely Participatory Guarantee System-India (PGS-India), Fertilizer Quality Control System (FQCS) and Soil Health Card (SHC).

PGS-India portal: PGS is a process of certifying organic products in accordance with the laid down standards. It can be accessed at the URL www.pgsindia-ncof.gov.in. The portal enables small and marginal farmers to have easy access to the organic certification system. It also promotes transparency in the certification process and results in creation of a database of (i) Organic producers and (ii) area under PGS certification with due traceability.

Fertiliser Quality Control System (FQCS) portal: The FQCS portal is a web-based and configurable workflow application developed for processing of fertiliser sample collection, testing and generation of analysis reports. It can be accessed at the URL www.fqcs.dac.gov.in. The application leads to automation of most of the manual activities involved in quality control of fertilisers and thus, helps in improving the overall quality control system.

Soil Health Card (SHC) portal: The SHC portal is a web-based workflow application with following major modules; (i) Soil Samples Registration (ii) Test Result Entry by Soil Testing Labs (iii) Fertilizer Recommendations based on STCR and GFR (iv) Soil Health Card generation along with Fertilizer Recommendation and micronutrient suggestions (v) MIS module for monitoring progress. It can be accessed at the URL www.soilhealth.dac.gov.in. The system envisages building up a single national database on soil health for future use in research and planning.

The portals are funded under the centrally sponsored scheme National e-governance Plan in Agriculture (NeGPA), which aims at development and implementation of ICT enabled projects for ensuring timely access to agriculture related information for the farmers of the country. PGS-India and Soil Health Card (SHC) portals are web based applications available in the public domain. The information on the portals, which is relevant to the farmers, can be accessed by them. Fertilizer Quality Control System (FQCS) portal is for official use by the fertilizer quality control laboratories.