New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch a centrally-sponsored nationwide 'Soil Health Card' scheme on February 19. The scheme aims to provide soil health cards to over 14 crore farmers in the next three years to check overuse of fertilisers in farm lands.
The Prime Minister will roll out the scheme from Suratgarh in Ganganagar district of Rajasthan on February 19.
The Soil Health cards will carry crop-wise recommendation of fertilisers required for farm lands, thereby helping farmers in identifying health of soil and judiciously use soil nutrients.
The agriculture ministry has already formulated a national "mission" to provide 3 crore cards to farmers in 2015, 5.50 crore cards next year and remaining 5.50 crore in 2017.
A digital system is being developed so that local agriculture science centres across the country can keep details of soil-test results. Soil samples will be collected even from small tracts of farm land in remote villages.
The country has a total cultivable land of 14.1 crore hectares and the government plans to take 2.48 lakh samples from all states and test the quality of soil in three years.
The system will, eventually, allow farmers to download the "Soil Health Card" using "unique number" allotted to each soil sample. In that case, change of ownership of the particular farm land will not create any problem in getting such cards or getting them updated.
The state governments will prepare yearly action plan on the issue and the cost will be shared in the ratio of 75:25 between the Centre and states.
Though a few states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh have made progress in distribution of cards in couple of years but most of them did not make it operational beyond the villages around various agricultural universities. The central scheme aims to address this issue.
Since collecting soil samples and uploading/updating the test results will be a mammoth exercise, the Centre has written to states urging them to take the help of students of agriculture universities for the task.
"All soil samples will be tested in various soil testing labs across the country. Thereafter, experts will analyze the strength and weaknesses (micro-nutrients deficiency) of the soil and suggest measures to deal with it. The result and suggestion will be displayed in the cards," said an official.
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