Telangana: Federations will help farmers to pick right corp, get better price
Hyderabad: Chief Minister and TRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Friday unveiled a major plan to revitalise agriculture in the state by organising farmers into federations at different levels, which will hand-hold farmers in terms of corp selection and marketing.
The federations will be set up at village, mandal, district and state-levels.
The federations will decide who should sow which crop in which village and to what extent. This would help farmers to select corps to be sowed as per the type of soil and could help them get optimal results.
For instance, water deficient areas could be encouraged to opt for less water intensive corps, so as to ensure that farmers don’t get affected by the shortfall in rain.
The government will provide Rs 500 crore seed capital to state-level federation. However, the federations would become self-sustaining by creating a revolving fund by taking a nominal contribution (Rs 1 or Rs 2 per tonne) and the aim is to have Rs 3,000 crore seed capital from the contributions in the next two or three years.
The federations will directly deal with traders on price and reach a memorandum of understanding with them. Since the federation would be representing an entire district, it would have a better bargaining power in the negotiations with traders as compared to individual farmers, who are often found to be at mercy of traders.
“In the new set up, no farmer will sell his produce individually. The federations will fix the price and tell traders that they will sell produce only if traders offered the stipulated price. This is to ens-ure remunerative price for farmers,” Mr Rao said.
In case, prices fall at any stage, the federations will support farmers by giving interest-free loans from the seed capital till the market prices improve but they will not allow farmers to sell for their produce for lower price.
“In fact, I talked about categorising crop colonies in Telangana in the Assembly in 2014 itself. Crops will be recommended as per climatic and soil conditions in a particular area. Now what happens is when a farmer sells turmeric for Rs 15,000 per tonne, all others are blindly following him by sowing turmeric, leading to oversupply and crash in prices. When tomatoes touch Rs 50 per kg, all are opting for tomato crop due to which the price falls to Rs 2 per kg, resulting in huge loss for farmers,” Mr Rao said.
