Karnataka to tread Telangana path

In the election year, neighbouring State plans to follow Telangana on extending farm sops

February 17, 2018 11:12 pm | Updated 11:13 pm IST - HYDERABAD

The investment support scheme (ISS) planned to be rolled out from the next kharif season by the Telangana government has found followers even before its implementation as neighbouring Karnataka going to polls in the coming summer is formulating a similar scheme to make it as one of the major poll planks of the ruling party there.

Sources in Telangana Government told The Hindu on Saturday that the Karnataka Government has deputed its Additional Chief Secretary (Department of Personnel, Administrative Reforms and E-Governance) Rajeev Chawla to Hyderabad to study the scheme. Mr. Chawla interacted with Special Chief Secretary (Revenue) Rajeshwar Tiwari, Principal Secretary (Agriculture) C. Parthasarathi and others for three hours to gather information about the scheme “planned for the first time in the country”. “The Additional Chief Secretary of Karnataka told us that their government (Chief Minister Siddaramaiah) had enquired about the scheme immediately after it was announced by Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao about six month ago and had been toying the idea to implement a similar scheme since then,” the sources said. They had been following the planning of the scheme in Telangana and had formulated a draft already. Asked as to what prompted the announcement of the scheme, the Telangana officials were understood to have explained the visitor that declining returns and vulnerability of farm sector, rising input costs and low minimum support prices and inadequate and untimely institutional credit had made the government believe that there was scope for investment support.

Further, they stated that the intervention (investment support) would prevent the farming community from falling into debt trap and would also help promote crop colonies by organising farmers from village to State-level into 'rythu samakhyas' or farmers federations.

They explained the government plans to extend ₹4,000 per acre investment support both for kharif and rabi crops before the commencement of the season and also how farmers' database was created with the help of 'rythu samagra survey' and taking up land records updation.

“The Karnataka official explained that they were planning to extend a similar sop to at least one crop season by fixing a ceiling on per farmer extent of the land for the assistance,” the sources said adding that he highly appreciated the novel initiative of Telangana Government.

On the status of investment support scheme, the sources said formulation of operational guidelines was under the final stages.

The Revenue Department was expected to give the land database collected during the extensive exercise taken up from September 15 to December 15 last year and based on that the exact extent of land for investment support would be decided.

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