Nearly 2 lakh women benefit from ITC’s ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ programme

ITC has extended its ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ programme to nearly 2 lakh women in the country.

The annual report of the company for 2023-24 said it has launched a comprehensive ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ programme across 19 States to enable a transformation journey from ‘low yield low resilient’ areas to ‘high yield and high resilient’ villages through a package of agronomy practices, climate resilient varieties, precision farming, water management and appropriate mechanisation.

According to the report, 27.94 lakh acres and over 10.5 lakh farmers, including 1.95 lakh women farmers, have been covered under ITC’s ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ programme till date.

• Also read: Tea prices drop at Kochi auctions as arrivals increase 

In addition to promotion of ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ practices at scale in core agricultural catchments, ITC also has a ‘Climate Smart Village’ (CSV) programme, it said.

Under CSV programme, support is provided to majority of village population to enable adaptation to climate risks, mitigating the same through knowledge, livelihood diversification, natural resources management and institutional support.

It said that 6,755 CSVs covering major crop value chains are currently part of the programme. To provide additional support to farmers in dealing with climate risks, 15.24 lakh linkages were facilitated for farmers with six major government schemes.

Aspirational districts

Aimed at boosting agricultural and allied activities in 27 aspirational districts of eight States under the ‘Aspirational Districts’ programme, ITC’s collaboration with NITI Aayog is in its second phase. This phase focuses on internalising capability enhancement methodology for training of farmers as well as communicating the model village template amongst government teams and agencies such as Krishi Vikas Kendras.

During the year, over 12 lakh farmers were trained on package of practices for principal crops of the region as well as on livestock management, resulting in over 44 lakh cumulative farmer interactions. Similarly, the government has also initiated work on 8,000 model villages based on the activities demonstrated by ITC across 1,350 villages during the initial period of the partnership.

Estimates indicate yield improvement of up to 30 per cent for cotton, maize, paddy and soyabean in locations covered by the programme, it said, adding, the cost of cultivation is estimated to have reduced by nearly 15 per cent, resulting in expansion of farmer incomes by up to 60 per cent.

ITC MAARS

The report said ITC has scaled up ITCMAARS – a crop-agnostic full stack agritech digital platform, together with a physical ecosystem, across 10 States. This is aimed at enhancing the competitiveness of domestic agri-value chains, strengthening market linkages and building traceable and climate-smart value chains.

The ITCMAARS ‘phygital’ platform spans more than 1,650 farmer producer organisations (FPOs) encompassing more than 15 lakh connected farmers and several industry partners, including agri-input manufacturers, banks, financial institutions and agritech start-ups.

By synergistically integrating agri technologies, ITCMAARS is developing a robust ecosystem to seamlessly deliver hyperlocal and personalised solutions to the Indian farming community leveraging world-class digital tools (including IoT) to develop new and scalable revenue streams, strengthen sourcing efficiencies and power ITC’s world-class Indian brands.

According to the report, ITCMAARS platform provides hyperlocal e-market services for agri inputs and farm outputs, enables access to credit and provides a wide range of predictive and prescriptive advisory services covering weather forecasts, agronomy, best practices for improved productivity, quality assurance, etc.

The integration of these package of practices enables the agri ecosystem to make a transformational shift towards superior value creation for all stakeholders. The ecosystem also provides access to sustainable agri inputs such as biologicals and nano-nutrients to farmers. New age functionalities such as ‘KrishiMitra’ – the world’s first Gen AI based voice chatbot for farmers, enables innovative user-interface in vernacular languages deploying voice to text technology, thereby easing the adoption of digital technology by farming communities, it said.

ITC, which has extended the ITCMAARS ecosystem to promote FPOs engaged in millets farming, has partnered with the Indian Institute of Millets Research, Hyderabad, to promote high-yielding varieties and advanced package of practices among millet farmers, it added.

• Also read: As domestic market faces supply crunch, natural rubber prices top ₹205