Port Blair: Taking a decisive step towards digital governance in agriculture, the Agriculture Department has begun equipping farmers in South Andaman with a technology-driven fertilizer booking system aimed at making agricultural services more transparent, accessible and efficient. In a significant move towards modernising agricultural service delivery, the Department of Agriculture has launched an intensive awareness and training initiative to familiarise farmers with the newly introduced Digital Fertilizer Booking System, marking another step in the Islands’ transition towards transparent, efficient and technology-enabled governance in the agriculture sector.
As part of this initiative, the Department of Agriculture, South Andaman Zone, successfully conducted awareness-cum-training programmes across 12 Gram Panchayats of South Andaman district on July 2. The programme, organised by Agriculture Officers (Extension) in collaboration with ATMA staff, was aimed at enabling farmers to seamlessly access fertilizer-related services through a dedicated mobile application.
The training sessions provided participants with a comprehensive demonstration of the application’s features, including farmer registration, Aadhaar authentication, fertilizer booking, OTP verification and other key operational procedures. To ensure practical understanding, farmers were also given hands-on training using their own smartphones, enabling them to independently navigate the application and book fertilizers without intermediaries.
The initiative drew an enthusiastic response, with 291 farmers participating alongside Panchayati Raj Institution (PRI) members and Farmer Friends. The interactive sessions offered participants an opportunity to clarify queries relating to the rollout of the system, registration procedures, fertilizer booking for farmers from other villages and other operational aspects of the digital platform.
Officials said the initiative is part of the Department’s broader efforts to promote transparency, improve service delivery and harness digital technology to make agricultural inputs more accessible to the farming community. By simplifying the fertilizer booking process and reducing procedural hurdles, the mobile application is expected to enhance convenience for farmers while ensuring greater accountability and efficiency in the distribution system.
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The awareness campaign also underscores the Department’s commitment to empowering farmers with digital skills and encouraging wider adoption of technology-based agricultural services, paving the way for a more responsive, farmer-centric and digitally connected agricultural ecosystem across the Islands.
