GUNTUR: The Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University (ANGRAU) has appointed scientists in the most drought-prone southern districts of Andhra Pradesh State with an aim to improve the income levels of farmers.
The government had identified five districts of Anantapur, Chittoor, Kadapa, Kurnool and Prakasam to make the 1.65 lakh farm households there drought-resistant.
The Andhra Pradesh Drought Mitigation Project (APDMP) sought to collect statistics by appointing scientists through ANGRAU. Hence, Vice-Chancellor Dr V Damodar Naidu appointed the principal scientist Dr G Subba Rao to collect the required information from Prakasam district along with two other scientists.
The other scientists appointed are Dr K Sunil Kumar for Kadapa, senior scientist Dr S Malleswari for Anantapur, Dr S Balaji Naik for Kurnool and senior scientist Dr P Prathima for Prakasam with two other scientists in very districts.
The objective of the programme is to strengthen the adaptive capacity and productivity of agriculture in the rain-fed areas and the project’s financial outlay is Rs1,042 crore for a duration of five years.
The project aims to achieve its objective through three main components of climate-resilient production systems, drought-proofing through natural resource management (NRM) and water governance and management and lesson learning.
The project would be implemented in 105 clusters in 345 village panchayats in five districts of the State for the benefit of 1.65 lakh farm households.
The scientists who are appointed by ANGRAU would provide weather forecasts, agro-advisories by establishing Climate Information Centres (CLICs) in drought-prone areas in five districts.
They would further explore the possibilities through soil surveys and generation of related information to augment income levels of farmers in these areas.