New Delhi, Apr 27 (IANS): The Agriculture Ministry is planning to develop an integrated portal for Real Time Crop forecasting (RTCF) system that will integrate the diverse information using the advanced digital technology.

For the last few years, the Agriculture ministry has laid increased emphasis on digitalisation of agriculture and even signed MoUs with several companies for multiple reasons. The latest idea of the portal is to get a system that will help in crop forecast.

"This will be done by integrating the diversity of data sets and methodologies or harmonizing various divisions/organisations with the use of advanced digital technology," said an official from the Ministry.

One of the important steps would be the Monthly Crop Forecasts that are proposed to be released from the data collected through the portal. Currently, the Agriculture Ministry gathers all such data and analyses these at multiple levels. "Once this is up and running, we are looking at a real time, almost automatic situation assessment and forecasts," the official said.

The Ministry has constituted a Task Force under the co-chairmanship of ADG (Statistics) from the Department of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare and Senior ESA from the Department of Economics and Statistics under the Ministry for development of this system in a time-bound manner.