Increasing Productivity through Skymet Weather Information & Crop Advisories - Alwar (Rajasthan)
The effects of climate change are now visible globally and India too is facing the harsh impacts of the same. The weather patterns is been changing rapidly and community which is suffereing the most by the phenomenon are the farmers, which consitutes the largest share in the overall population as well as the labour force of the country.
Since more than 60% of the country’s population is dependent on the agriculture and allied activities and agriculture is mostly weather, particulary rain dependent, the fate of the farmers is hence decided by the weather itself. Even if they do best of their capabilities or invest enormously in getting the best agri-inputs, they are not sure if they would be getting good returns out of all efforts and money they are putting into their fields.
Also, sometimes the weather remains favoarable throughout all the stages of the crop, but sudden pest infestation and disease outbreak leads to partial or complete damage of crop. Farmers either don’t know what remedial mesuares should be taken to tackle that or he remains unaware of the right remedial measures to be taken, which causes them to loose his crop in either of the cases.
To address such issues, Skymet under the project “Partnership in Climate Services for Resilient Agriculture in India” provides weather infmation and crop advisories directly to the farmers in the 31 districts of 9 states. Skymet uses muliple channels to broadcast the infomration so that maximum number of farmers could be benefitted.
To provide the direct access and customised weather information, Skymet developed the SkyMitra App, which gives user to access direct weather information. Knowing the fact that most of the farmers do not possess the smart phone, Skymet sends the weather informationa and advisories through SMS to the registered farmers, which can be seen on the feature phones, Farmers who do not have mobile phones at all or less literate are provided the weather information through the weather display boards which are placed at the common areas. All these information provided by Skymet is meant to benefit farmers and to make them more productive.
One such benefitted farmer is Ramanand Jaat (38), who is resident of Alwar district of Rajasthan and possess 5 acres of land. When asked the availbility and acess to weather information, Ramanand said that they were not able to reach to any of the weather forecasts earlier and they used to be completely unaware of the upcoming weather situation that might occur in the near future and hence they used to be always in risk and vulnerability. Nearly 50% of his crops used to get damaged by any of the weather extremes including the frost, fog and rain.
Now, he is getting weather information and crop advisories, which has increased the yield and ultimately the production. He said that they get the advance information about the rain and hence prepare theirselves and plan the crop activities accordingly foe example they do the threshing f Pearl millet (Bajra) on time knowing the rain forecasts, which has increase the yield significantly.
He got the information about the medicines and remedial measure to protect the crop from the frost and benefitted from the information about the insect management and weed control in wheat crop. The crop yield has increased remarkably by following those information. The information shared by Skymet has not only led to the better productivity but the lesser inputs in terms of labour and money which ultimately resulted in the better revenues generated to the farmers.
He said he is making other farmers aware about the benefits of the services and bring more farmers on-board into the project and he thinks these services should be continued.