Centre talks to States on new mechanism to gather crop data

National conference discusses Digital General Crop Estimation Survey to enhance agricultural statistics accuracy and transparency for policy formulation and planning.

Ahead of the nationwide implementation of the Digital General Crop Estimation Survey (DGCES), the Centre has convened a national conference with the States to discuss the improvement in crop production statistics in New Delhi on Thursday (August 22, 2024).

The new initiative, according to the Centre, aims to enhance the accuracy, reliability and transparency of agricultural statistics — which will help in policy formulation, trade decisions and agricultural planning.

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Chairing the conference, Union Agriculture Secretary Devesh Chaturvedi said there is a need for continuous collaboration between the Union and State governments to achieve the shared goal of enhancing the quality of agricultural statistics.

“The primary focus of the conference was on the enhancement of agricultural production estimates and the integration of technology to strengthen data accuracy,” the Centre said in a release.

The Centre had announced the move to hold Digital Crop Survey in the recently presented Budget and had said that it will help in accurate crop-area estimation.

“It will provide plot-level data with geotagged areas of crops and act as a single source of truth,” the Agriculture Ministry said. “DGCES has been initiated to calculate yield based on scientifically designed crop cutting experiments for all major crops across the country. These initiatives are expected to provide near real-time and reliable data directly from the field, enabling more precise estimations of crop production,” the Ministry added.