One stop call centre for farmers coming up in Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram, March 21 (IANS) To provide professional inputs to farmers, the Kerala agriculture department is setting up a state-of-the-art call centre where all the queries of farmers would be answered.

The Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium set up under the agriculture department is setting up this call centre located in the World Market here.

A top official who is coordinating the project told IANS that this would be ready in a month's time.

"The single objective of this call centre is to make available the best agriculture and dairy farming practices to farmers and address their numerous doubts," said the official who did not wish to be identified.

At the moment a team of officials is preparing a bank of the probable questions and also finding the suitable answers.

So far more than one lakh questions likely to be asked by the farmers have been shortlisted. These questions range from soil testing to manures besides anything to everything on farming, across all crops and vegetables, said the official.

The reason why they are preparing a question bank is to see that there is only one answer for a question, irrespective of how many times it is asked.

Professionals from the field of agriculture, dairy farming and others will answer the queries, said the official.

One of the reasons why the government has decided to come out with a professional advice mechanism for farmers is that the contribution of agriculture in the gross domestic product of the state has been steadily declining from 36.88 per cent in 1980-81 to a mere 8.95 per cent in 2013-14, the official.