Bhubaneswar: To bring better transparency in Paddy Procurement, the State Government has decided to continue village-wise plot level analysis of paddy crop growing area of the State till Khariff Marketing Season 2028-29.
Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare (FS&CW), Principal Secretary Vir Vikram Yadav has decided to conduct village wise, plot level analysis of paddy crop growing areas using farmers registration data, cadastral maps, land records data (RoR) and near high resolution satellite images captured during the crop maturity period in both Kharif and Rabi Crop seasons, officials said.
Odisha Space Applications Centre (ORSAC) has successfully implemented the project covering all 30 districts during the Kharif crop season and all 17 districts covered during the Rabi Crop Season from KMS 2021-22 to KMS 2023-24.
The objective based evaluation of farmer reported paddy crop, plot-by-plot, village-by-village, eliminating mis-reporting, has streamlined the procurement operations in the paddy procuring districts, they said.
Based on successful implementation of the project by ORSAC, the FS&CW department has extended the project for further implementation in 9 crop seasons by ORSAC, i.e., from Khariff Crop season (KMS 2024-25) till Khariff crop season (KMS 2028- 29).
Kharif and Rabi Paddy crop procurement by Government of Odisha is a time bound exercise. Every year millions of farmers report paddy cultivation in millions of plots spread across the state that has more than 51000 villages.
The FS&CW Department has implemented the P-PAS system to facilitate such reporting by farmers who are interested to sell their paddy crop to government availing the minimum support price (MSP) providing details of land on which they have cultivated the paddy crop.
Village wise plot level analysis of the paddy crop reported by farmers has been introduced to check genuineness of the farmer reporting. The task warrants thorough understanding of the procurement process and close coordination with ORSAC, FS&CW department and its establishments.
Further, the assignment involves large scale mobilization of infrastructure and highly skilled remote sensing, GIS and IT professionals with extensive domain to experience to handle the large-scale data analysis, geo-spatial database generation, image analysis, quality checks, field checks, rule-based validations, field trainings, etc. for time bound delivery, the officials informed.
