ICRISAT: Realizing the need for tribal farmers to adopt new technologies in agriculture and to improve their income levels, Tribal Cooperative Finance Corporation Ltd (TRICOR) of the Tribal welfare department, Govt. of Telangana has joined hands with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) for organizing exposure visit cum study tour for tribal farmers in Telangana.
Exposure visit cum study tour shall be organized for 500 farmers over a period of one year in 20 batches, with 25 tribal farmers in each batch for 6 days. In these visits, each batch will focus on identifing themes like agriculture, horticulture, floriculture, vegetable cultivation, livestock & poultry, fisheries and diary. These visits are likely to enhance the knowledge, help T tribal farmers implement different agriculture techniques and increase their confidence towards agriculture. It will help tribal farmers learn new innovative farming, the marketing strategies, local farming concepts, processing, preservation and drip irrigation techniques across the globe.
The First batch was kick-started on 04 Dec, 2017 at ICRISAT, Patancheru. That Venkateshwarlu, MLA (Aswaraopet) and Chairman for Tribal welfare, Shankara Rao, DGM (A&F), TRICOR, Lakshmi Prasad, State Mission Manager, TRICOR and Smt. Sandhya Rani, Asst. Director (Horticulture), Dept. of Tribal welfare has graced the inaugural ceremony along with Dr. Kiran K Sharma, Chief Executive Officer of Agribusiness and Innovation Platform (AIP) of ICRISAT and Mr. Aravazhi, Chief Operating Officer of Innovations and Partnership (INP) of AIP-ICRISAT.
The T.Venkateshwarlu highlighted the need for growing millets and its benefits. He said the visits facilitated by ICRISAT is a platform for tribal farmers to learn new techniques and the farmers need to contribute to build a better Telangana by educating other farmers after they return. He pointed that Govt. of Telangana is encouraging farmers through various irrigation projects that support cropping round the year.
Dr. Kiran K Sharma said there is a need to link farmers to market to improve their income levels and farmers need to think differently by adopting new technologies and inputs, and readily integrate other sectors like IT in to agriculture for better results. He encouraged the farmers to turn to entrepreneurship in agriculture through adopting the post-harvest technologies and slight changes in traditional ways based on new learnings from visits will help to get better yields.
Mr. Aravazhi said that AIP of ICRISAT will extend its support to the participating tribal farmers even after the training through the Technical Support cell (TSC) for one and half year. So the farmer can always come back if they have any queries in implementing the learnings from ICRISAT.
