Agricultural contingencies preparedness meeting for Haryana

KARNAL: An Interface meeting on“Enhancing the Preparedness for Agricultural Contingencies in Kharif 2015 for Haryana State” was organized with various stakeholders on Tuesday at ICAR-CSSRI, Karnal. The objective of this meeting was to prepare the action plans based on district contingency plans to deal with the agricultural contingencies in the eventuality of deficient rainfall during kharif season based on IMD Monsoon forecast for Kharif, 2015.

Dr Ramesh Krishnan, IAS, Director General (Agriculture), Govt. of Haryana briefed about the lessons learnt during the implementation of the contingency plans last year and  emphasized impact of deficit rainfall on ground water recharge and  power supply in the state. He lauded the role of KVKs in preparation of action plan for rain deficit situation of each district in association with agriculture department.

Dr. K.S. Khokkar, VC, CCSHAU stressed upon the technologies developed by CCSHAU, NDRI and other ICAR institutes for managing early, mid-season and terminal droughts particularly in south west Haryana which is more drought prone. He also emphasized on the need of mechanization for minimizing drought impacts.

Dr. A.K. Srivastava, VC and Director, NDRI informed the house that the worst affected sector is livestock due to low feed and fodder availability and explained about various long and short term measures followed for optimizing the livestock production during drought.

Dr. B. Mohan Kumar, ADG (AAF&CC) stressed the need for fine tuning of contingent plans and need to operationalize as this is the high time to deliberate and finalize the action plans.

Dr. Ch Srinivasa Rao, Director, CRIDA apprised the status of monsoon as predicted by IMD for Haryana and stressed the need for preparing action plans for minimizing the rainfall deficits in districts that are supposed to receive low rainfall.

Dr. Rajbir Singh, Director, ZPD (Zone-1) insisted that there should be more frequent interaction of officials of department of agriculture and KVKs for better preparedness and implementation of contingency measures.

Earlier, Dr D. K. Sharma, Director, CSSRI welcomed the delegates and mentioned about the role of salt tolerant varieties and soil test based nutrient application for maintaining sustainable production during deficit monsoon.

The district level officers agriculture department of Haryana and Programme Coordinators of KVKs of respective districts presented the action plans relating to contingent measures like seed availability of alternate crops and cropping system, soil water conservation measures, availability of various inputs etc. in the event of deficit rains.  It was suggested to prepare block wise contingency action plans and also sensitize farmers for taking up weather-based crop insurance schemes.