The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...

-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...

-The Indian Express The income transfer scheme was the highlight of the budget. But its success will need deft manoeuvring. Like in each of the previous two years, the run-up to the budget this year was rife with fears of significant fiscal slippage if the government caved in to political compulsions. And like in prior years, these fears turned out to be exaggerated. The decline in fiscal deficit ratios has indeed...

-The Hindu The farming work is being taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana Thiruvananthapuram: A 13.5-acre ‘padasekharam’ in Plavodu ward of Pulimath grama panchayat that remained fallow for years is being transformed into a paddy field as part of the Kudumbashree District Mission’s fallow less-village activities. Taken up by the Kudumbashree’s Pulimath community development society under the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana, the organic paddy...

-The Indian Express subsidy for crop insurance is preferable to fertiliser, power or farm credit. But Centre should bear the full cost for the scheme. A well-conceived and pro-farmer crop insurance scheme — the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) — is faced with the prospect of going the fertiliser subsidy way. Just as in the latter’s case, the benefits from subsidy on crop premiums, too, seems to be going primarily...