Officers of the agriculture department office in Patna on Wednesday. Telegraph picture

Patna, Feb. 23: The department of agriculture is turning a new leaf with technology.

The department would be providing the district agriculture officers with laptops and other gadgets to make work smoother.

The joint directors, deputy directors (Patna headquarters) have been provided with laptops.

Junior plant protection officers at the district-level would also be provided with laptops and desktops.

The farmers, on the other hand, would be getting an online soil health card too.

The state government had initiated a scheme called Promotion of IT in agriculture.

Under the scheme, the government has sanctioned a fund of more than Rs 1 crore.

A.C. Jain, the nodal officer, IT department of agriculture, said: “Altogether, 82 district agriculture officers, joint directors, deputy directors and junior plant protection officers would benefit under the scheme. Laptops, desktops, LCD projectors, fax machines, photocopiers, digital cameras, scanners and inverters would be provided to them too.”

To train the officials, 60 computer operators will be hired.

All the 38 districts along with Patna headquarters would benefit from the scheme. Adding to these benefits, the department of agriculture will be getting a soil map made for Bihar soon.

Jain said: “The farmers will be provided with an online soil health card. With this, the farmers will be able to see the status report of their soil online. Unlike before, farmers won’t have to wait for days for the report to come from the district headquarters.”

Manager, IT, agriculture department, Neha Ruchy said: “Online reporting system for four centralised schemes in 38 districts have been started.”

The four schemes are Macro Mode, Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana, Isopom and National Food Security Mission.

Presently, farmers are dependent on soil testing laboratories at various district headquarters.

The soil is sent to the respective headquarters and the report is sent back by post.

This proves to be time consuming and sometimes, the report gets lost as well.

Now they will be seeing the report of their card online without fear of losing it since every farmer would be having their own ID.

The soil health card system is a web-based information system designed to run on a networked environment including Intranet and Internet.