ICAR-CIRCOT Organized 3 days Skill Development Programme for cotton farmers and graders under SMART Project.

Despite producing the best quality cotton, Indian bales are graded as highly contaminated in the world market. The contaminations in Indian cotton get mixed up at several stages during harvesting, transportation, storage at farmers’ site and ginneries. Apart from contamination, our cotton quality is compromised due to cultivation of several hybrids, mixing of good quality and poor-quality cottons, sprinkling of water to add weight, improper storage of cotton at farmers’ site, etc. There are many bad post-harvest practices of cotton going on unabated from several decades that leads to deterioration of cotton quality causing losses to farmers and other stakeholders. Such practices can be curbed provided farmers are trained and informed about their ill effects.

In order to address these issues, recently, Ginning Training Centre (GTC) of ICAR-CIRCOT, Nagpur organized 3 days skill development programmes on “Best Post-harvest Management Practices for Production of World Class Bales from Indian Cotton” for 340 lead farmers and multi-tasking graders in 8 batches for 12 districts of cotton growing regions of Vidarbha and Marathwada. The remaining candidates will be trained during the month of December, 2022. These programmes were organised under the World Bank funded SMART project of the Government of Maharashtra aimed to transform Rural Maharashtra through interventions in Agriculture and livelihood sectors.

The training programme focused on creating awareness among participants on importance of cotton quality to meet the international requirements and imparting skill development pertinent to maintenance of cotton quality parameters, contamination and trash free cotton production and quality-based grading & marketing of cotton.