Updates on crop prices, weather, import, export information will be sent through SMS

Updates on crop prices, weather and an advisory on farming will on your fingertips, literally.

In April, the Punjab Mandi Board had signed a MoU with Reuters for Reuters Market Light (RML) project, which would be formally launched by Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on October 21. With this, all farming-related information will be available through SMS alerts.

The service has already become a hit. After its soft launch in Punjab in September-mid, 2,600 farmers have subscribed to it. “The RML project is an information service for farmers that will have a positive impact on their livelihood. We are covering nine crops, including wheat, paddy, maize, cotton, potato, kinnow and a few vegetables, in about 70 out of 145 mandis of the state. We are using mobile phones as a medium of disseminating information in Punjabi language using Roman and Devanagari scripts since majority of the handsets do not support Gurmukhi,” said a company officer.

He said, “The farmer can chose from three packages of three months (Rs 260), six months (Rs 500) and a year (Rs 850).”

The service provides price updates of different crops, particularly during the harvest time, weather updates and crop advisory duly validated by agriculture experts from Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) or other reputed institutes like Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). Farmers are being given information regarding prices of two crops of their choice prevailing in three mandis near their village or any other place of their choice.

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