The country has a high expectation from the budget from the incumbent government. Considering agricultural sector, widespread expectations covering critical aspects are there equally there from private sector, public sector, researchers, trade participants, service providers and other stakeholders.
India being one of the largest agriculture producing countries needs to keep ahead on the technology front for meeting its food requirement and matching the market pace. This requires further strengthening of the R&D and bio-technology set up in the country with more focus on commercialization of the technologies/ varieties developed through the R&D. Further, adequate linkages are required between public extension services and research institutions to facilitate effective and timely knowledge dissemination.
Strengthening the quality control infrastructure across the value chain of agricultural crops may now be on priority for the Indian agricultural sector. Structured spending to improve the quality control infrastructure and implementation mechanism is required for improving the quality of food produced, processed from both organized and unorganized segments.
In the previous years also there has been focus on creation of additional warehousing capacity for better handling and waste reduction at the post-harvest stage. Allowing a priority sector status to bank lending against warehouse construction under the flagship projects such as Grameen Bhandaran Yojna (GBY) and Private Entrepreneurs Guarantee (PEG) would surely trigger private investment in the warehousing sector providing additional warehousing capacities at the district and block level.
Agriculture insurance has been a long debated issue. The lack of strong agricultural insurance schemes has kept agriculture unhedged from the vagrancies of nature reducing the risk taking appetite of the farmers. There is a strong budgetary support required for enabling the insurance sector to bring agriculture in the mainstream insurance thereby providing an insurance net to the farming community.
Further, since agriculture is the mainstay of around 60 per cent of our population there is no income guarantee/ pension for people landless laborers/ small and marginal farmers. The budget should focus on boosting the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna (PMJDY) for creation of adequate infrastructure and network to disseminate micro pension services through financial inclusion network of banks and micro finance institutes
The budget should also focus on the food processing sector. Specific allocation of budget needs to be done to promote the processing activities in the sector. Further boost from Ministry of Food Processing Schemes for supporting small and medium food processing infrastructure will encourage the growth of the food processing sector.
Restrictions such as banning the movement of food grains from one state to another and from one district to another within the same state have hindered further growth of the sector. Though indirectly GST is expected to have a multi-faceted impact on the productivity and price realization in the sector, it is also required to examine inclusion of agriculture related taxes under the General Goods and Services Tax (GST).
There is a strong need to strengthen the extension machinery of the states for providing effective support to the producers. Budgetary allocation for creating additional capacity development of trained extension officers at the field level for each state will help dissemination of information to the farmers.
Source - http://www.businessworld.in
