National e-Governance Plan Agriculture envisaged providing relevant information and services to the farming community, private sectors and other stakeholders through the use of information and communication technologies, to supplement and strengthen the existing delivery channels provided for by the department and its agencies.
In order to achieve this project goal, the below described were outlined as the SMART or Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound objectives that had to be met by the project.
- Improve access of farmers to timely and relevant information & services throughout crop-cycle
- By providing Multiple delivery channels to access information
- By reducing time between generation and dissemination of information
- By providing information to the farmer through a uniform platform
- Bringing farmer centricity & service orientation to the programs by providing location specific and up-to-date crop management related information in terms of:
- GAP – how many days, season specific, crop specific, location / zone specific
- POP – how many days, season specific, crop specific, location / zone specific
- Providing personalized advisory services
- Increasing effectiveness of government service delivery in
- Certification and licenses related to Manufacturing and Marketing through use of ICT
- Providing easier and approachable channels for grievance registration and tracking
- More effective management of schemes of DACFW thru process redesign aimed at
- Effective Monitoring of the Schemes (timeliness of implementation etc)
- Reducing time required for data consolidation and reporting of schemes at all levels
- Enable private sector participation to benefit farmers by providing an integrated platform to promote value added services in
- Extension
- Marketing (both input and output)
- Post-harvest & Storage
In order to successfully implement and sustain the MMP, it is required that it gets the necessary impetus from top level officials at the central and the state government levels. As a result, to guide the state in the implementation process and also to align the processes with the centre PriceWaterhouseCoopers was selected to set up a State Project Management Unit (SPMU) at Directorate of Agriculture, Assam in August 2014. The project has been uniformly designed into 4 phases (Assessment, Design, Project Management (Pilot), Project Management (Rollout), and Evaluation.
The Governance structure as finalized by Department of Agriculture, Co-operation and Farmers’ Welfare (DACFW), Government of India (GoI) is as below-