A vision document for agricultural activities

Keeping in the mind the target which the government had committed a few years back to double farmers’ income by 2022, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her second union budget seems to provide an action plan for achieving the somewhat over-ambitious target.

The critical aspects of the finance minister’s budget speech (2020-21) was the announcement of the 16 point action plans for boosting farmers income through series of measures including strengthening markets, creating cold storage infrastructure, wear-housing, credit, sustainable use of fertiliser, support to dairy and fisheries besides extending benefits of Kisan Credit Cards (where banks provide loans to farmers under priority sector lending norms) to all those farmers who gets Rs 6000 annually under centre’s scheme – Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi.

Other key aspects of the finance minister’s speech include creating storage facility on the land owned by FCI, Warehousing Corporation of India, comprehensive measures to reduce the difficulties of 100 water-stressed districts. “Farm markets need to be liberalised, farming need to be made more competitive, handholding of farm-based activities need to be provided, sustainable cropping patterns and more technology needed,” Sitharaman said.

FM has acknowledged that substantial support and hand-holding of farm-based activities such as livestock, apiary, and fisheries needed to be extended to farmers.
More than seven crore farmers are engaged in dairy sector (a chunk of them are women) mainly attributed to the success of ‘Operation Flood’ which resulted in India emerging as biggest milk producer in the world for last two decades. Milk is the biggest traded agricultural commodities in terms of value in the country.

Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the National Animal Disease Control Programme for eradicating the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and Brucellosis in the livestock. With the allocation of Rs 12,652 Crores for a period of five years till 2024, the programme aims at vaccinating over 500 Million Livestock including cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats and pigs against the FMD. This would give a boost to the livestock sector.

The FM’s announcement of increasing coverage of artificial insemination from the present 30% to 70%, use of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) for fodder farming and increasing milk processing capacity from 53.5 million tonne (MT) to 108 million MT by 2025 would give a boost to dairy and allied sector.

Much needed seamless national cold supply chain for perishables, inclusive of milk, meat and fish, the FM’s proposal of creation of ‘Kisan Rail’ – through PPP model is a welcome announcement and should be expedited as India incurs huge losses in perishable commodities comparison to global norms.

The ‘Krishi Udaan’ to be launched by the Ministry of Civil Aviation on international and national routes for tapping the potential of fruits and vegetable productions in the north-eastern regions is a much-needed step. In June 2018 few consignments of Tripura’s ‘Queen’ variety pineapples were sent to Dubai through air route for accessing the potential of fruits and vegetable exports from the region.

India’s horticultural crops (fruits, vegetables & flowers) have surpassed foodgrain production in the last many years and the FM’s announcement of cluster-based approach (one product, one district) is a welcome step.

However, the Operation Greens announced in 2018-19 budget for ensuring a steady supply of onions, potatoes and tomatoes – through an Operation Flood-type exercise has been slow.

FM’s thrust on promoting multi-tier cropping, bee-keeping, solar pumps, solar energy production in non-cropping season is welcome step especially extending PM-Kusum scheme for providing 20 lakh farmers in setting up solar pumps and supporting 15 lakh farmers solarise their grid-connected pump sets is a futuristic step.

The Financing on Negotiable Warehousing Receipts (e-NWR) which has currently has crossed Rs 6000 crore and its integration with e-National Agricultural Market (eNAM) would be a challenging task as intra-state trade is yet to be facilitated through eNAM platform.

(The writer is is Delhi based Agri-researcher and senior consultant with Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations)