Maharashtra agriculture department to be linked through video conferencing

In a bid to speed up the process of decision-making and ensure better communication between top-level officials of the Department of Agriculture, the government of Maharashtra has proposed an ambitious plan to link all the high ranking officials of the department through video conferencing facilities.

Estimated at around Rs 90 lakh, the project will be implemented with the help of the National Informatics Center (NIC). "The central government has sanctioned the plan and we hope that the state government would finalize all the details by the end of March 2001. It may start operating by the month of May 2001'' explained Yeshwant Kenzhale, Computer Manager, State Agriculture

Commissionerate.

"The main concept is to connect the joint directors at the district level to the state level through video conferencing. This will help in reducing time in communication, cut down on traveling and enhance a fast decision making process. Moreover, a facility of this nature would come in handy during times of natural disasters," he explained.

The conferencing would take in its ambit primarily the seven sites namely the agriculture Commissionerate, Mantrayala in Mumbai and the five divisions out of the proposed eight divisions. These proposed divisions are located in the following districts -Pune district that includes Pune, Solapur and Ahmednagar. Other seven divisions located in Nashik, Kolhapur, Thane, Aurangabad, Latur, Amravati and

Nagpur.

The officials however, are yet to work out the details involved in networking. "We have still not finalized the list of these five divisions that will be connected through video conferencing. We are still discussing the infrastructure plan with NIC and hope to finalize it in the next three months'', said

Kenzhale. 

The proposed video conferencing would be an addition to the presently existing Agrinet Network. Agrinet connects the district, sub-divisional, tehsil and the circle offices at the village level to the agriculture Commissionerate at the state level. They have been connected mainly through the Internet.

The Agriculture Commissionerate also has a plan to launch Geographical Information System (GIS) for remote sensing. Kenzhale said that while the picture was not clear enough, the general idea was to offer geographical information regarding land to the farmers. This would require digitizing maps of village lands and other information on soil fertility, irrigation availability and crop production plan with other such agriculture related information will be made available online for the farmers.