On September 24, 2020 Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Narendra Singh Tomar launched “Centralized Farm Machinery Performance Testing Portal” (https://www.agrimachinery.nic.in/FMTTI/Management) in public domain. The Portal has been developed by the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare (DAC&FW), Ministry of Agriculture.
Minister of State (MoS) for Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Parshottam Rupala, MoS for Agriculture, Co-operation & Farmers Welfare, Kailash Choudhary and Secretary of Agriculture, Co-operation & Farmers Welfare, Sanjay Agarwal were present during the launch.
Objective:
i.It has been launched to improve services of farm machinery testing institutions and to bring transparency in the process of testing and evaluation of machines related to farming.
ii.The Testing and evaluation of agriculture machinery will encourage improvement in quality of the agricultural machines.
Key Points:
i.The portal will facilitate manufacturers in applying, communicating and monitoring the progress of testing of machines.
ii.Flexible Access – It is easily accessible from any location and any device across the internet, which means the officers working at the Ministry can monitor the activities from anywhere.
iii.It will improve the efficiency of testing institutes by reducing testing time for agricultural machines and equipment.
iv.It is in line with Government Policy of “Ease of Doing Business”, as it ensures transparency and also a faster feedback mechanism.
v.The Comparative data will be available to manufacturers, which will help in the improvement of the design of the product and open up avenues in commercialization of agricultural machinery on national and global levels.
Additional Testing Centres:
To meet the increasing demand for testing and evaluation of agricultural machinery DAC&FW has identified and authorized 35 institutions under State Agriculture Universities, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and state governments, in addition to Four Existing Machinery Training & Testing Institute.
Recent Related News:
i.On August 18, 2020, India ranked first in number of organic farmers and 9th in terms of area under organic farming. Notably, Sikkim was the first state in the world to become completely organic and other states including Tripura and Uttarakhand have set targets to be on the same line.
ii.On August 9, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Central Sector Scheme (CSS) of financing facility under the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund of Rs. 1 lakh crore via video conferencing.
About Ministry of Agriculture:
Union Minister – Narendra Singh Tomar
Minister of State (MoS) – Parshottam Rupala, Kailash Choudhary
