HYDERABAD: The Commissioner for Agriculture, Poonam Malakondaiah, has said that all the mandal agriculture offices in the State will be computerised by 2006-07.

"Fifty per cent of the 213 mandal agriculture offices have been computerised so far and the remaining will be completed by 2006-07," she said inaugurating a national workshop on "WEB services on oilseeds development: DACNET (Department of Agriculture and Cooperation Network) Phase II initiative" organised jointly by the Directorate of Oilseeds Development and the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Hyderabad, here on Tuesday.

She said the State Government was according top priority to application of information technology to agriculture. As part of it the department had started training two Rythu Mitra clubs in each gram panchayat to make optimum use of computers. There are two lakh such groups in the State and at least two groups in each gram panchayat would be imparted training in a phased manner.

MoU soon

Ms. Malakondaiah said computer networking had already been done up to major gram panchayats and it would not be difficult to train progressive farmers. She said her department was willing to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with NIC to apply IT to the field of agriculture.

The Deputy Director-General of Agricultural Informatics Division of the NIC, M. Moni, said the Centre was keen on ushering in eGovernance in the field of agriculture. The NIC began initiatives by laying the roadmap for IT in agriculture way back in 1995.

He said DACNET was an eGovernance initiative executed by the NIC to facilitate agriculture-on-line and implement eGovernance solutions in the 40 directorates and 132 field offices of department of agriculture and cooperation.

He said demand had been made to earmark at least 6 per cent of annual agriculture budget to develop IT in agriculture department.

The Directorate of Oilseeds Development (DOD) Director, N. V. Patel, exuded confidence this year the target of 30 million tonnes oilseeds production would be achieved.

The Deputy Director-General, NIC, Hyderabad, C. S. R. Prabhu, said utility mapping of Hyderabad was already under way. Fifteen different utility services would be mapped with the help of the Geographical Information System (GIS) and satellite imagery, he added.

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