Sangareddy: Agri officers to click ‘selfies’ with farmers who did not receive loan waiver

The Agriculture department, which developed a mobile app to help complete the loan waiver process, will train AEOs on how to use and collect the data from Tuesday.

Sangareddy: Farmers, who did not get the loan waiver because their families were not determined due to lack of ration cards, now have to be present at their homes during the coming week. This is because the local agriculture extension officer (AEO) will visit their homes and take selfies with the family members of the farmer and upload the picture along with all the details of the family. Since many farmers, who had small holdings, had migrated to nearby towns and cities to work in industries or run small businesses, the decision of the State government for this process is forcing them to return home.

The Agriculture department, which developed a mobile app to help complete the loan waiver process, will train AEOs on how to use and collect the data from Tuesday. The AEOs have to tour the villagers under their clusters from Wednesday onwards. Since the mobile app will also track the GPS location of the photographs uploaded, the visiting of AEO to homes of farmers is mandatory.

---

“They can not sit in office or at one place to call the farmers to the place to collect all the details because the app tracks the location,” an officer who collected data by using the app for testing its efficiency told Telangana Today. Since a good number of farmers from the erstwhile Medak district migrated to other places including Mumbai, Hyderabad and other parts of the country, they would not be considered for the loan waiver unless they are present at their homes on the day the AEO visits them.

However, the Agriculture department is yet to take a call on what they would do if the family head is not present but his wife is present here.

Though the State government says it launched the initiative to bring transparency into the entire process, the same could however deny the loan waiver for farmers who could not be present at their houses on that particular day. And there is no system yet to alert them in advance. Agriculture officials said they were still discussing all the pros and cons of the process they had planned with the mobile app.