Agricultural Planning and Information Bank for East Khasi Hills District of Meghalaya

The economy of the North Eastern States has remained dominantly agriculture based. While the potential for development of the rural economy of the region through agriculture is vast, this sector has not made much progress as compared to the rest of the country due to various reasons. In an age of liberalization of the economy and globalization, modern agriculture can thrive only with uptodate information access to the farming community. Information and communication technology (ICT) has a critical role to play in the development of agriculture. Contribution to this endeavour from space technology is available in the form of data on land use, soil, weather etc as well as communication connectivity in difficult terrains, through satellites providing remote sensing, communication and weather monitoring services. APIB for East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya is an effort in providing a single window access system for geo-spatial and other agriculture related information to the farming community. Establishment of single window access to information and decision support to all types of users of agriculture and allied sectors necessitated pooling of relevant information from numerous organizations and compilation, synthesis and analysis to meet the user needs. Building necessary linkage with the relevant organizations for data collection and service dissemination was done for effective implementation of various tasks. Computerized data storage, synthesis and the required analyses for Remote Sensing (RS) & Geographic Information System (GIS) inputs along with other agriculture related information of APIB decision support system were implemented in Client Server architecture environment using MS SQL RDBMS and software development tools. APIB database hosted on the web with the URL http://megapib.nic.in is now currently in operational use for East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya.