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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Jaitley's farm-inclined Budget promises new agricultural schemes -- but not the funds for them -Mridula Chari

Jaitley's farm-inclined Budget promises new agricultural schemes -- but not the funds for them -Mridula Chari

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published Published on Feb 2, 2018   modified Modified on Feb 2, 2018
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The agriculture budget grew more than the actual budget in 2018-19.

Some of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s promises to the agriculture sector in his Budget speech may be a little difficult to keep.

Jaitley on Thursday announced two funds together valued at Rs 10,000 crore to develop infrastructure for the fisheries and animal husbandry sectors. But his Budget has allotted only Rs 10 crore to the Fisheries and Aquaculture Infrastructure Development Fund and Rs 37 crore to the Dairy Processing and Infrastructure Development Fund set up in the last Budget. There is no mention of an Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund.

Jaitley also announced an Agri-Market Infrastructure Fund that would have a corpus of Rs 2,000 crore to develop and upgrade infrastructure in 22,000 Grameen Agricultural Markets and 585 state-run Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee markets, where farmers are obliged to sell their produce. However, the Budget document does not show any allocation to this fund.

Over the past year, farm distress despite bumper production had triggered farmer protests across India. In his speech, Jaitley reiterated the Bharatiya Janata Party’s promise to double farmer incomes by 2022 by increasing the minimum support price the government promises to farmers to cover their cost of production, connecting agricultural markets digitally so farmers are updated on prices across geographic regions, promoting horticulture and food processing.

Despite these gaps, though, the outlay for the three main departments of the agriculture ministry has in fact increased 14.6% to Rs 57,600 crore in the 2018-’19 budget from Rs 50,263 crore in the revised estimate of 2017-’18. This is somewhat higher than the 10.12% increase in the size of overall budget. By comparison, the 2017-’18 budget grew 12.28%, but the agriculture ministry’s share of that increased by 12.96%.

Last-minute irrigation push

In light of the concerns about how climate change could hurt agriculture expressed earlier this week in the Economic Survey, the government’s annual assessment of the state of the economy, the Budget devotes some attention to how farmers access water. It is increasingly evident that India’s monsoons are becoming increasingly erratic due to climate change, constraining farmers in their ability to plan and protect their crops.

Among the schemes Jaitley mentioned was the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana, a core irrigation scheme of the government announced in July 2015 that combined three existing schemes. The government has allotted Rs 9,429 crore to it for the coming year.

This is the first time that the Budget has even approached this planned amount. When it launched the scheme, the government said that it would allocate Rs 50,000 crore to the scheme over five years, amounting to Rs 10,000 crore per year.

The lowest it ever spent on the scheme was Rs 5,133 crore in 2016-’17, as is evident from the actual expenditure released in the 2018-’19 budget.

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Scroll.in, 2 February, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/867203/jaitleys-farm-inclined-budget-promises-new-agricultural-schemes-but-not-the-funds-for-them


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