LAHORE – Over 350,000 farmers have been registered in the Punjab under (Punjab Information Technology Board) PITB’s developed centralised system agriculture e-credit scheme .
The scheme was stated by Punjab PITB Chairman Dr Umar Saif to review the progress of the agriculture e-credit scheme . The PITB chairman said that the scheme has improved liquidity in agriculture, timely availability of crop inputs, yields as well as profit margins. PITB’s developed centralised system for managing the database to raise efficiency and accountability of the schemefor the Punjab Agriculture Department’s initiated interest-free loan scheme for small farmers . The scheme provides loans to farmers possessing land less than 12.5 acres and has a flexible repayment option.
The meeting was further informed that the distribution of mobile phones has been started among the registered farmers and around 110,000 farmerswould be given mobile phones with 10 agriculture-related applications to enhance their capacity and to disburse to loans to the farmers through mobile wallet.
More than 55 million households are directly or indirectly tied to this sector. The salient features of 10 mobile applications include tutorial (information) to welcome the newly-registered farmers and verify their credentials,
It includes weather alerts to show the forecasts based on the latitude and longitude of the farmer’s location for five days.
It has crop calendar to provide crop specific advisories, educate farmersabout new technologies, methods and techniques related to various crops, video on demand to primarily serve the needs of farmers whose mobile literacy is low.
A section is allocated for expert opinion to talk to an expert, crop yield calculator to allow farmers to calculate the approximate cost of seeding, fertiliser and pesticide usage and crop yield based on their land size and crop type,
‘Mandi’ app to connect farmers with potential buyers and to use easy paisa mobile wallets for payments.
It will educate about agriculture subsidy to enable farmers to redeem subsidies given through various types of tokens including potash fertiliser subsidy through the app.
Through this app, hyper spectral imagery to capture satellite imagery of land and check the health of the crop, soil moisture, pest information and then using the above mentioned parameters to recommend remedial measures.