The Budget rightly recognises ‘Productivity and Resilience in Agriculture’ as the first of the nine priority pillars for a Viksit Bharat.
Apropos nutrition security for the consumers, the incentive to transit from carbohydrate-centricity to nutrition-focus is seen in the commitment to a mission-led focus on pulses and oilseeds, besides cluster-based large-scale vegetable cultivation and fisheries. Financial support to start-ups, FPOs, storage and marketing besides digital technology can be expected to result in robust supply chains, benefiting both farmers and consumers.
Secondly for negotiating the impact of climate change, one of the major announcements aims to bring 10 million farmers under the practice of natural farming, supported by establishment of 10,000 bio-input centres. In promoting low-input-sustainable agriculture practices, securing consistent productivity growth is a must, particularly in the context of rising population and inelasticity of arable land. Hence, natural farming must be backed by R&D. One can hope that comprehensive review of agricultural research and emphasis on developing climate-resilient varieties, including millets, will not only ensure sustained growth but also promote adaptation and mitigation interventions.
Thirdly, the resource use efficiency, which is being addressed through soil health card, micro-irrigation, nano-fertilizers, biological approach to pest management, etc., will now get a boost with major attention the Budget pays to deployment of digital technology across the agricultural value chain. The proposed digital public infrastructure (DPI) will prove advantageous not just in respect of resource use, but also in planning for market intelligence-led production matrix, negotiation of production- and post-production-centric risks. It will also facilitate forecasting of weather, rainfall, pests and diseases, as also prices, and sharing of real-time advisories with the farmers, helping them in minimising production and profit losses.
One of the critical and persistent inadequacies has been inaccurate assessment of area and crop coverage. Being eye-estimates, the data points are a wrong reflection of the reality. Data integrity is important in achieving price equilibrium by balancing supply and demand. The proposed digital crop-survey covering 400 districts is bound to generate more accurate data sets, and pave way for a more diligent production planning, arable land usage, import-export management as also food distribution under the food security law.
The new growth engines are horticulture, animal husbandry and fisheries. These sun-rise sub-sectors find support through ‘Horticulture Clean Plant Program,’ NABARD-financing of shrimp production and export. The spin-off effects would be diversified production basket, higher farmers’ incomes and agri-share in the GVA, and risk management.
Structural challenges emanating from land division and fragmentation, high dependency of workforce (more than 45 per cent of the country’s total of 56 crore workforce), and marketing inefficiency warrant redressal. The proposed ‘National Cooperation Policy,’ and land related reforms will strengthen the efforts of FPOs in enhancing scales of economy. The assignment of unique land parcel numbers (Bhu-Aadhaar), and digitisation of survey maps and sub-divisions will enable comprehensive land management.
Land records
The problems of inefficient land mutation, and land record maintenance causing inaccessibility to institutional credit and other government-offered entitlements will find solution, and further support land consolidation. Updated land records, test-based soil profile, use of satellite survey and geo-fencing of land boundaries based on equitable-exchange between farmers can accelerate the pace of consolidation. Further, the ‘Registry of Farmers’ linked to demographic data, Aadhaar number, mobile number, Jan Dhan account, and land details of the farmers will prove to be a firewall-protected system for direct delivery of services.
Robustness of growth rate is predicated upon gross capital formation ‘in’ agriculture (land development, irrigation, farm machinery, etc.), and ‘for’ agriculture (power, roads, processing parks, markets, etc.). The increased target of institutional credit, high capital allocation for rural roads (PMGSY), PM-Gati-Shakti and irrigation infrastructure (Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh), flood management in Andhra and Assam will trigger higher agricultural growth rate.
While all these are laudable proposals, it brooks no delay in re-mandating agriculture as a job- and income-centric private enterprise. The Budget lays high dividend by the labour-intensive MSME sector, skilling, and employment-linked incentive. This should help in absorbing the surplus manpower now un-gainfully engaged in agriculture. Since artificial intelligence and automation will prove to be labour-substituting, agriculture sector itself will need to be re-mandated as a provider of gainful employment. Agro-processing can create large number of jobs.
A confluence of various schemes relating to food processing, MSME, NRLM, ‘Lakhpati Didis,’ RKVY, Stand-up India, Start-up India, etc., can be targeted to roll out ‘Secondary Agriculture.’ This revolves around processing of both food and non-food parts of the agri-produce, and alternative activities like bee keeping, mushroom cultivation, agro-forestry, bamboo, etc. The R&D must, therefore, aim at agri-produce to meet the needs of food security and raw material for the bio-industries. The agriculture sector can then become a true enterprise, and farmer an entrepreneur. One can see nascent strands of secondary agriculture, too, in the Budget.
The writer is former CEO, NRAA, and Chairman, Empowered Body, DFI