JKAGOA delegation calls on Director Agri, projects issues

Excelsior Correspondent

JAMMU, Sept 2: A delegation of the Jammu and Kashmir Agriculture Graduates Officers Association (JKAGOA), led by its president, Surinder Radotra, called on the Director Agriculture Jammu, Anil Gupta, and apprised him of several issues affecting Agriculture Extension Assistants (AEAs) and Junior Agriculture Extension Officers (JAEOs) across the Union Territory.

During the meeting, JKAGOA expressed serious concern over the increasing burden of non-departmental assignments being imposed on Agriculture field staff, stating that such duties are adversely affecting the effective implementation of agricultural programmes and extension services.

JKAGOA highlighted that AEAs and JAEOs are the principal field-level functionaries responsible for implementing major agricultural programmes and schemes at the Panchayat and Circle levels including JKCIP, HADP, CSS, PMKSY etc.

The AEAs and JAEOs are also actively engaged in e-KYC, Agri-Stack, Kisan Credit Card (KCC) verification, field inspections, farmer awareness programmes, pesticides, and plant protection measures. Despite these extensive responsibilities, Agriculture field staff are frequently assigned duties pertaining to other departments.

They raised concern over implementation of the Digital Crop Survey (DCS) and Digital Crop Cutting activities and added that DCS is a joint exercise to be executed and supervised by both the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Revenue. Since the Revenue Department is the custodian of land records and traditionally responsible for Girdawari and land record management, its active participation in the survey process is essential. However, in practice, the entire responsibility of conducting surveys is being placed upon Agriculture field staff alone.

JKAGOA demanded that the deployment of Revenue officials, particularly Patwaris, alongside Agriculture field staff be ensured.

The Association pointed out that AEAs and JAEOs are already burdened with extensive technical, developmental and extension responsibilities. The imposition of additional non-agricultural duties has resulted in mental stress and has adversely affected their ability to focus on core agricultural services and farmer welfare programmes. JKAGOA also urged the Government to formulate and implement a suitable risk and life insurance policy for all field employees.

Among those present on the occasion were Sindu Jyoti Sharma, Surinder Sharma, Supinder Singh, Chanchal Kumar, Rohit Gupta, Amit Kumar and Rohit.