Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu on Friday said farmers of the country were not looking for free power but supply of uninterrupted power for achieving sustainable agricultural growth and check migration of youth from rural to urban India.
Dwelling on the 12-point agenda for sustainable agricultural growth in the country, Mr. Naidu said farmers had been seeking quality and uninterrupted supply of power to reap benefits from the farming sector. Unfortunately, even after 70 years of Independence, nearly 4,000 villages had not been electrified till now. The Modi government provided electricity to 14,000 villages which were deprived of power supply over several decades, he said.
The Gujarat government has not been providing free electricity to farmers and that was the reason that the State has achieved development on various fronts. “The farmers are not seeking free power but full power,” Mr. Naidu said.
Delivering the VKRV Rao Memorial Lecture on ‘Challenges and opportunities facing Indian agriculture’ at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) here, to mark the 47th Founders’ Day of the institute, Mr. Naidu said the farm sector had been facing numerous challenges such as low credit inflow, low investment, climate change, and market failures, but still 52% of the country’s population depends on the sector.
The Vice-President’s 12-point agenda for spurring the growth in the sector included: providing good quality seeds; balanced use of fertilizer; release of timely institutional credit; diversification of agricultural activities by focusing poultry, dairy etc.; food processing; farm mechanisation; intensification of agriculture by focusing horticultural activities; judicious use of water, particularly surface water; larger share in consumer prices for farmers by declaring higher MSP; reform in land policy such as contract farming; climate change; and strengthening R&D in the farm sector.
Mr. Naidu said prices of perishable commodities vary from one city to another owing to lack of food processing infrastructure in rural India. Producers were suffering owing to glut in the production. Therefore, just increasing production was not enough, he said.
Quoting a World Bank report, Mr. Naidu said still 60% of farmers in India depend on moneylenders and non-institutional sources of credit. He told researchers and scientists to work at least six months in the field not only to learn requirement of farmers but also to disseminate new available technologies to farmers.
