ETC India is presently guiding SDC-IC projects in Kerala, Sikkim and Orissa in implementing PTD by their respective project partner NGOs and Government Department. In all the three states, the main objective is to promote sustainable agriculture and crop production through PTD.

ETC provides PTD process guidance, which involves facilitating to evolve social organization, management structure and linkage with scientists, knowledge centers, inputs supply and banks for implementing PTD and subsequent scaling up of the successful / promising technologies and the process. Another key process guidance involves facilitating experimentation by the farmers of various promising technologies together with scientists and GO / NGO partners in a participatory manner always keeping the farmer’s interest central.

While the crops in the three states are different in the PTD project, there are areas of common relevance, for instance, like principles and strategies followed in tackling a particular problem of pest & disease and soil management in these crops. What is similar is the structure and social organization followed in implementing PTD. Therefore, sharing and exchanging experience between projects will benefit one an all. Issues like what type of social organization is good for PTD. Some NGOs could select existing SHG, while other NGO / GO selected farmers and later formed SHG or selected farmers out of existing SHG and formed them into a PTD group. All of these have advantages and disadvantages. The frequency of meeting, discipline in the farmer’s group, content of discussion in the group meeting would have been important in the capacity building at the group level. The type and level of facilitation by the NGO / GO field staff would also have influenced the quality of capacity building. We can expect a varying degree of such facilitation in the three projects and local circumstances, which might have facilitated positive or negative experience.

Sharing of above experience between projects can help in avoiding some pitfalls and strengthening the implementation of PTD in taking timely decision when in doubt based on other’s experience. While exposure visits and cross visits to each other’s area will facilitate such experience sharing, it will have logistical and budgetary constraints to ensure each and everyone in the project to avail such an exposure. With the help of this PTD online forum, an attempt is being made to stimulate sharing of such above issues of common interest by everyone involved in these three PTD projects.

We hope to achieve sharing across the projects through 1) Online moderated PTD CHAT and 2) Online Discussion Forum. ETC India will moderate online chat once every two months on a pre agreed date to facilitate sharing of experience. We will identify topics of common issues, subsequently also together with the participants, to make it a theme based e-conference. On the discussion forum, the participants can post their queries, share experience and other participants (only registered users of the forum) can reply to the queries in their own time.

We welcome all involved in these three PTD projects from SDC/IC, GO / NGO staff, technical experts and also interested farmers to register to be part of the online PTD forum.

Please sign up to register and fill the profile. All the data filled in the profile will be visible only to the registered forum members, which will also serve as introduction to each other. So, we request you to kindly fill in all the fields.

For furtehr details, kindly contact the moderators of the PTD Online CHAT Mr. Dilip Chinnakonda and Mr. Mans Lanting.