New Delhi: Addressing persistent complaints of farm distress and crisis in agriculture, the government on Thursday announced that Minimum Support Price (MSP) for upcoming crops would be fixed at one and a half times the cost of production and institutional credit for the agriculture would be increased by Rs 1 lakh crore to Rs 11 lakh crore.
While making his budget speech on Thursday, finance minister Arun Jaitely also announced that NITI Aayog, in consultation with state governments, will evolve a suitable mechanism to enable access of lessee cultivators to credit without compromising the rights of the land owners.
“Now, we have decided to implement this resolution as a principle for the rest of crops. As per pre-determined principle, government has decided to keep MSP for the all unannounced crops of kharif at least at one and half times of their production cost,” Mr Jaitley said.
The steps in the budget come after large-scale farmers protests across the country, specially in poll-bound states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Mr Jaitley also allocated '2,000 crore for setting up agri-market and infra fund and Rs 1,290 crore for a national bamboo mission as also.
The government also announced for the first time, a new initiative titled “Operation Green” through which farmers can get the right price and products are available to the consumers at suitable prices.
For this purpose, a provision of Rs 500 crore has been made. Apart from this, Rs 200 crore has been given to encourage medicinal and aromatic crops cultivation.
Increasing the MSP is not adequate and it is more important that farmers should get full benefit of the announced MSP, the finance minister said.
He emphasised that farmers need to make decisions based on prices likely to be available after the harvest in order to get better price realisation.
The budget also proposed extending the facility of Kisan Credit Cards to fisheries and animal husbandry farmers to help them meet working capital needs.
Activists, however, said that the budget was a grand posturing and was hollow in terms of real outlays.
Swaraj Abhiyan, headed by Yogendra Yadav, said the outlays for market intervention and Price Support scheme (important schemes in the context of the government’s promises on prices) fell from 950 crores of revised estimates last year, to a meagre 200 crores.
