The state forest department is developing a software for providing immediate compensation to those who suffered crop losses because of wild animals. The software would reduce the time taken (one-month at present) for paying compensation to the affected farmers, forest officials said.
The software, which is at the testing stage, is likely to be launched by the end of July. It will be installed on the personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, which are similar to smartphones, given to the beat guards.
Beat guards, who are representatives of the forest department for a cluster of villages, usually submit the compensation report manually. The entire process takes more than four weeks if the incident took place in the remote and hilly terrain areas. The primary report involves details of the losses, along with photographs.
The software will have facility for the beat guards to click photos of the location, fill details of the losses and upload it on the intra-departmental website. This will enable the higher officials to approve the compensation package as per the state government's norms.
Since the last one year, the forest department has allotted PDAs to the foresters and trained them to use its facilities such as GPS. The new software will bring more transparency in the process, forest officials said.
M K Rao, chief conservator of forests (Kolhapur region), who advocated digitization of the department, said the farmers can claim for compensation over a phone call.
"At present, everything is being done manually which takes time. As per norms, the farmers must get compensation within 30 days of receiving the report. However, the process gets delayed due to several interventions. Now, the manual process will be limited to filling the details," he said.
"The beat guards will file the report using the software to the range forest officer, who will scrutinize it and forward it to the assistant conservators of forests for approval. Since the process doesn't involve physical transfer of documents, it can be completed within a few days instead of one month," he added.
The Kolhapur range of forest department comprises five districts including Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg. Since the last decade, the number of crop loss complaints has increased from a few hundreds to thousands. Most of the crop loss incidents in Kolhapur and Sindhudurg districts were the result of increasing population of wild elephants.
Rao said digitization will help the farmers get compensation at the earliest over a phone call. "Most of the villages adjoining the forests have mobile numbers of our beat guards. In case of crop losses because of wild animals, they can call our guards to register cases. Every PDA will be equipped with the boundaries of each beat. This will make it easy for the guards to check whether the farmland falls in his/her jurisdiction," he added.
Source - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
