LAHORE – In a radical reform in the agriculture sector, Punjab govt has set up a digital platform to facilitate the farmers in the province.
The initiative, Connected Agriculture Platform for Punjab (CAPP), will help to eliminate the role of middleman.
Earlier, the farmers were completely depended on the middlemen and unable to deal directly with buyers to sell their crops.
The platform will, now, directly provide farmers loans, subsidies, location-targeted advice, pest warnings, yield forecasts, and marketplace to sell their products, using smartphones.
Last year, it was announced that around 500,000 eligible farmers would be provided 3G/4G-enabled smartphones along with free SIMS and data bundles under CAPP.
Telenor Pakistan had signed an agreement with Inbox Business Technologies to develop this project, aims to empower farmers by bringing them into the digital and financial mainstream.
The CAPP, an initiative of Telenor Pakistan in collaboration with Inbox Business Technologies, also aims to connect all stakeholders in agriculture value-chain but not limited to agriculture input providers, research institutions, commodity buyers, supply chain services provider, and agriculture extension workers.
As per detail, to enable farmers to exploit the full potential of this platform, hundreds of facilitation centres and booths will be established for the training of thousands of farmers and creating Digital App Gurus across the province.
The Company was chosen by Agriculture Department Punjab and Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) for their flagship project `Digital and Financial Inclusion of Kissan’ which includes smartphones and a digital platform comprising Android Apps for hundreds of thousands of farmers in Punjab.
It is mentioned here that about 60 percent of Pakistani households are associated with agriculture and more measures need to be adopted to bring improvements to this sector.
