Wrong Agri Data

Beware of wrong farm Data
( content curtesy : “Farm data Woes” The Hindu Businessline dt.25/10/11)

Be careful with any data in hand related to agriculture sourced government – warns the newspaper editorial. The editorial of Hindu BL also goes ahead  and suggest that for farm data accuracy its time to switch over to remote sensing technologies.

Some of the data released in recent times with full of blunders are as below:

It was reported ( year ended September 2011) that India exported an all time high 3.57 lakh tones of coffee, making a 33 percent jump over 2009-10 ?? Whereas the production for the year is only 3.02 ( domestic consumption is over a lakh …..shipping out more the country produced !!???).

Take sugar…says the editorial – where the output during the2008-09 season was first pegged at 220 Lt and the successively brought down to 205 Lt, 150-155Lt and finally to 145.38. It was just the other way around in 2009-10, where the first estimate was 146 Lt, which finally ended up at 189.12 Lt

In Cotton the 2010-11 crop was initially assessed at 325 Lakh Bales, then raised to 329 Lb, and suddenly slashed to 312 Lb before finally being restored to 325 Lb.

Its Ok if these data is used purely for academic interest but those who use it a preamble to business strategies…. beware !

The editorial suggests that its time to implement A vaidyanathan Committee’s recommendations of adoption of remote sensing, GPS sensors for village level data for improvement of agriculture statistics..