States urged to take lead in farm mechanisation, use of new technology

Union government aims for 75% farm mechanisation by 2047, emphasizing state cooperation and agricultural engineering colleges for progress.

HYDERABAD

The Union government is giving a lot of importance to farm mechanisation with a goal to achieve at least 75% mechanisation by 2047, with the cooperation and active participation of the State governments, Deputy Director General (Agricultural Engineering) of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) S.N. Jha has said.

Speaking at the inauguration session of the 39th annual workshop of the All-India Coordinated Research Project on Farm Implements and Machinery organised jointly by AICRP Hyderabad, ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal, and Professor Jayashankar Telangana Agricultural University here on Tuesday, he suggested that it was for the State governments to focus more on farm mechanisation since agriculture was the State subject.

He mentioned that the Union Agriculture Secretary had written to the Chief Secretaries of all State governments to have separate wings in their agriculture department for agricultural engineering. He highlighted the need for more and more agricultural engineering colleges in the country since increase in productivity would depend on mechanisation too, which would also attract youth towards the agriculture sector.

Vice-Chancellor of PJTAU Aldas Janaiah said the future of agriculture would belong to lesser intervention of human resources as agricultural engineering would be in the forefront. He stated that the way farming is done had undergone a lot of changes over the last 75 years and from use of only tractor-fitted tools, drone technology, artificial intelligence and digitalisation were being widely used now. Similarly, cropping patterns, productivity and production had also changed and improved.

Stating that more and more girls were also taking to agricultural education, Mr. Janaiah said use of new technologies such as mobile, drone and others were driving lesser human-intensive farming practices. He suggested ICAR take up AICR projects in new technologies such as agri-robotics and include PJTAU in it.

ICAR senior officials K.P. Singh, Director of ICAR-CIAE Bhopal C.R. Mehta, Director of Research PJTAU P. Raghu Rami Reddy and several agricultural scientists, faculty and students of PJTAU, progressive farmers participated. Several publications on farm mechanisation were also released on the occasion.