Karimnagar: AEOs not willing to take up Digital Crop Survey

They are planning to intensify agitation if the government fails to appoint assistants.

Karimnagar: Agriculture Extension Officers are not willing to take up Digital Crop Survey if the government does not provide assistants to them. While the state government is insisting AEOs to take up the survey, they are registering their protest by attending to duties by wearing black badges during the last few days. They are planning to intensify agitation if the government fails to appoint assistants.

To study the cropping patterns across the country, the union government launched a digital crop survey. While other states are doing the survey by engaging private agencies, the state government has decided to carry out a survey with AEOs. However, AEOs opine that the survey would turn out to be a huge burden for them since they are already being engaged in 49 types of duties such as Rythu Bharosa, Rythu Bima, PM Kisan, crop damage survey, crop harvesting benefits, paddy procurement and others.

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Besides 4000 to 8000 farmers, 6,500 to 8,500 acres of land falls under an agriculture cluster which is being monitored by an AEO. So, it was not possible to cover such a huge extent of area by a single AEO without an assistant, they argue.

In a cluster, there would be 15,000 to 20,000 farms. If it was a big cluster, there would be 30,000 farms. If a crop was not sowed when AEO visited the field, he/she has to visit again. So, if AEOs visit a field twice in a crop season, he/she has to visit all 15,000 farms 30,000 times. It would be difficult for them to visit fields such a number of times since a majority of AEOs were female.

Moreover, uploading photos of crops in mobile apps was another big problem. AEOs have to capture the pictures of crops located in a 25 meter radius and upload them on a mobile app. If there are different crops within 25 meter, they have to take more photos. An average, 20 photos have to be captured of the crop spread in one acre of land. AEOs have to upload 1.70 lakh photos of the crops spread in 8,500 acres of a cluster.

So, it was not possible to capture and upload such a big number of photos by a single AEO without an assistant, they opined. In order to succeed the pilot project, the government had deployed additional staff in the mandals where the survey was implemented on pilot basis.

The harvesting of Vanakalam paddy crops is going to start after the Dssara festival. They would be busy once the crop started arriving at paddy purchasing centers. Moreover, the government has decided to set up separate centers for normal and fine variety crops. So, they wanted the government to start a survey from the Yasangi season after appointing assistants. They were ready to monitor the survey if assistants were appointed.