Kohima, Jan. 19: In case the first call in her newly constructed cubicle tomorrow afternoon is from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, agriculture specialist Amenla of Nagaland?s agriculture department is ready with the answers. She is one of 30 specialist ?respondents? in the eight states of the Northeast, including Sikkim, of the Kisan Call Centres (KCC) to be inaugurated throughout the country by Vajpayee tomorrow.
Set up by the department of agriculture and co-operation, Union ministry of agriculture, the call centres are to fuse information technology and the latest know-how on agriculture for farmers living in the remotest of areas.
?Today almost every village has a PCO and we are banking on this,? says P. Bhuyan, project co-ordinator in Guwahati. She is from the Small Farmers Agri-Consortium (SFAC), the nodal agency to manage the KCC of northeastern states. MANAGE, Hyderabad, is the resource centre undertaking the capacity building of the subject matter specialists or respondents of the call centres.
Farmers will call up the four call centres in each state ? in departments of agriculture, horticulture, veterinary and animal husbandry and, fisheries ? to seek advice.
These ?level-one? centres will reply to the queries. If the problem is nagging, it may be answered by a ?level-two? resource centre in Calcutta. If that too does not work, the query will be resolved by an SFAC ?level three? centre. All this, in just 72 hours.
As Vajpayee will call up any of the call centres in the country from the BSNL headquarters in New Delhi, there are more hopes on the region.
With the Northeast Business Summit beginning tomorrow, the respondents in the eight states are going to be ?on their toes? for two days. ?It?s a big day for the Northeast tomorrow,? says Bhuyan. In light of all the attention that the Northeast has been getting from the PMO of late, Bhuyan hoped that Vajpayee might make an exception to make one special call to the Northeast.
Last weekend, M.N. Reddy of MANAGE trained the specialists, four from each of the eight states in the region, on how to manage the KCCs. ?All the respondents also made action plans for their own states,? said Amenla. The plans are strategies to deal with farmers? queries in respective states.
In Nagaland for instance, the conversations will be in either Nagamese or English. Similarly, all the states have decided to have their own office hours as the timings for the KCCs to run. For the Northeast, one more advantage will be telephone connections at the homes of the village council presidents.