Evolution of Agromet Advisory Services in India

Abstract

The need for a close collaboration between the Departments of Agriculture and Meteorology in India was felt by the Royal Commission on Agriculture during 1920s to better understand the relationship between weather and crops, so that disruption and damage caused to agriculture, economy and human life by weather hazards like drought etc. which could be reduced, marginalized or even controlled from turning into famine. This resulted in the establishment of Agricultural Meteorology Division at Pune in 1932. During the formative years, initiative was taken for implementation of the “Co-ordinated Crop Weather Scheme”, to establish observational set up and conduct research activities in collaboration with various organizations to understand crop stresses and related remedial measures. Journey of weather services to the farmers commenced in India Meteorological Department (IMD) with “Farmers’ Weather Bulletin” in 1945 to provide district wise weather forecast twice a day exclusively for them. In order to provide information on day-to-day weather based farm operations along with weather forecast, as per recommendations of the National Commission on Agriculture (1976), IMD started Agromet Advisory Services (AAS) at state level in July, 1977 from the then Madras (presently RMC, Chennai) and covered all the states. Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model forecast based services to the farmers were started by National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) at agro-climatic zone (ACZ) level in 1991 in collaboration with Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and State Agriculture Universities. AAS provided by two organizations were integrated into a single window system and started functioning as “Integrated Agromet Advisory Services (IAAS)” scheme in IMD, in XIth plan, at district level from 1 June 2008, which was further extended as “Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS)” in XIIth plan and IMD jointly with ICAR started catering services at block level from 2018 by establishing network of District Agro-Met Units at Krishi Vigyan Kendras. Agromet Advisories are being disseminated to the farmers through multichannel dissemination systems like print and electronic media, Door Darshan, radio, internet etc. including SMS under Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode supported by govt. and private organizations. State of art technologies are presently being used for development of Agromet Decision Support System, online system for receipt and transmission of Agromet data, generation of various land and satellite observation based Agromet products as well as for identification of appropriate remedial measures to save the crops from adverse weather situation. Various leading organizations of the country like, IMD, NCMRWF, IITM, ICAR, ISRO, IITs, NIC, SAUs, SDAs etc. joined hands for meaningful research activities and operational supports to extend the services to further finer spatial scales for longer duration.