‘KESAR project aimed to mitigate risk from natural calamities’

Pulwama, Nov 29 : Authorities of the newly established KESAR( Knowledge For Education And Sustainable Agriculture Risk Management) cell situated at Sher-e Kashmir University of Agriculture Sciences and Technology Kashmir believe that the farming community will be the ultimate beneficiary of the research project.
Kaisar Ahmad Rather, Operational head of KESAR, said this research project aims at development of technology and maps without manual intervention for the benefit of farmers.
He said that KESAR was established after signing of a memorandum of understanding between Agriculture Insurance Company of India Limited (AICIL), of which he is the J&K head, and SKUAST Kashmir.
The centre was inaugurated on 25 of November during GIS Meetup 2023 at the varsity campus in Shalimar.
Rather told Rising Kashmir that their staff is in the field in 9 districts of Kashmir except Anantnag for collecting basic details about various crops grown in these areas.
“We have started ground truthing for crop layer development,” he said, adding that this will help them in assessing the vulnerability of crops to changing climate.
He said that with the help of technology they will share advance forecast advisory with farmers to save them from loss and help in mitigating risk from natural calamities.
The officials further said that with the help of technology they will assess trends of the crop growth and can determine accurate loss to agriculture caused by various natural calamities like hailstorm.
“The damage will be assessed without manual intervention there by removing human bias,” the officials said.
The officials said that this academia corporate collaboration will benefit farmers as the technology has applicability for disbursement of various government schemes like Pradhanmantri Fasal Bhima Yojna.
Besides this the collaboration is dedicated to fostering development of post graduate diploma program curriculum, offering internship opportunities for students, expansion of joint research programs and sharing of facilities.
Professor Nazir Ahmad Ganai, Vice Chancellor of SKUAST described this as an important development for being very unique.
He observed that risk is something that changing environment and changing climate is posing to agriculture and therefore to farmers.
“We need to have some information and data driven applications and solutions and for that we joined hands with AICIL to have a centre,” the Vice Chancellor shared, adding that the centre was named after a lot of brainstorming.