Connected Agriculture Platform Punjab (CAPP), launched by the provincial Agriculture department, is all about digitizing the small/landless farmer community to make them well connected, well aware, and in control of their farming workflow. Punjab government is striving hard to make agriculture sector modernized and equipped with latest technology in the interest of farming community.
Under this scheme, at initial stage 110,000 smart phones will be distributed among registered farmers of Kissan Package and during next stage all registered farmers will get this smart phone, which will be equipped with special apps that help farmers to interact with agriculture experts for taking advice regarding improvement in crops, know the weather condition in real time and see videos about latest production technology of crops, know about crop calendar etc.
These phones will be provided on provision of Rs 500 for landless and tenants and Rs 1000 for land owners. This phase of the scheme was designed because of a lack of a systematic and efficient way to educate/inform the farmers was observed. A man-based, slow flow of information was the norm, resulting in farmers making hasty, ill-informed decisions, leading to financial losses and not reaping maximum potential profit.
The Department of Agriculture, Government of Punjab, in collaboration with Telenor and Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) has developed carefully crafted mobile apps services, keeping its unique target audience in mind, to enable technology to rapidly assist and cater to farmer needs. With these smart phones farmers will be able to apply for agri loans through the PITB-led app that would eliminate patwari and bank agent culture. It will create a technology-driven echo system that will give confidence to the farmers deciding what to sow, when & where to sell. Smart phone equipped app will also help farmers to receive alerts about weather conditions, crop diseases and protection and timely use of fertilizers and pesticides.
A departmental spokesman said here on Monday that Agriculture department has established "Facilitation Centers" in collaboration with Telenor Pakistan where farmers are getting trained regarding its efficient usage of Agri apps. Small farmers will benefit from this initiative in a big way as the smart phones would display agriculture related information to them within no time and would be helpful from sowing to harvest of crops, local weather updates, crop marketing. With this new technology farmer will have entire world on his palm and this step will lead towards increase agricultural productivity. Spokesman also disclosed that Agriculture department has distributed more than 45000 smart phones to the farmers.