By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, FEB 20, 2018: ADDRESSING the National Conference "Agriculture 2022 - Doubling Farmers' Income'', the Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Mr Radha Mohan Singh stated that the government is working towards increasing farmer's income and that's the reason that the budget for agriculture has been increased from Rs.51,576 crore in 2017-18 to Rs.58,080 crore for the year 2018-19 while ensuring sufficient funds for each component of the Seven-Point' Strategy devised for doubling farmer's income.

Mr. Singh said the apart from keeping the food and agricultural products warehouses well-stocked, the Government is keen to see farmers prosper and is working diligently to achieve the same. He further said that in this budget, an announcement of Rs. 2000 crore for Agri Market Development Fund has been made, which shows the importance of the retail market in agriculture marketing. These markets have been called as GRAM (Gramin Retail Agriculture Market). Through these markets, infrastructure of 22,000 Rural Haats and 585 APMC markets will be developed. 

The Minister said that as promised by the Prime Minister, Government had started forming a committee in April 2016 to implement a comprehensive plan to double the income of farmers. The Committee included senior economists, Joint Secretaries of food processing, crop, Animal Husbandry and Dairy and Policy Departments; Agricultural Advisor to NITI Aayog and many other non-official members. The Government is keen to make agriculture policies and programs 'income centric' instead of 'production-oriented'. 

To achieve this ambitious objective, as suggested by the Prime Minister, the emphasis is on adopting a multi-dimensional seven-point' strategy including, emphasis on irrigation along with end to end solution on creation of resources for 'More crop per drop', provision of quality seeds and nutrients according to the soil quality of each farm, large investments in warehouses and cold chains to prevent post-harvest losses, promotion of value addition through food processing, iImplementation of National Agricultural Markets and e-platforms, to mitigate the risk, introduction of crop insurance scheme at a lower cost and promotion of allied activities such as Dairy-Animal husbandry, Poultry, Bee-keeping, Horticulture, Fisheries.

 The Agriculture Minister stated that in a huge country like India with wide economic disparities, it is a challenge to ensure the physical and economic access to the basic good to far-flung remote areas. But during 2014-15, the government's favorable policies, effective plans, and implementations have yielded satisfactory results. He further said that under the leadership of Prime Minister, the government has started developing 'Climate Smart Agriculture' through a national-level project under which farmers are being made aware and capable of adopting climate-friendly farming techniques.