Chief Minister Jayalalithaa may in hindsight feel vindicated over the apprehensions she expressed two years ago on the Centre’s ‘Nutrient-based Subsidy (NBS)’ for fertilizers, with the latest Economic Survey pressing the need to ‘review’ the NBS policy.
After the previous UPA government shifted from a product-based subsidy (PBS) to the NBS regime in 2010, Ms. Jayalalithaa was one of the first Chief Ministers to call for scrapping the NBS, arguing that it was “threatening to deprive our farmers of their basic means of sustenance and livelihood.”
The AIADMK leader had even, in a letter, urged the former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to revert to the earlier MRP (maximum retail price) scheme, as the NBS plan, coupled with unreliable supply of fertilizers, would cause undue hardship to our farmers.
The Economic Survey has said that availability and consumption of NPK fertilizers have been “skewed towards N (nitrogen) or urea since the rollout of the NBS in 2010.
Indiscriminate use of NPK has led to “imbalanced use of soil nutrients, especially in Haryana and Punjab, leading to deterioration in soil quality and declining growth in land productivity in these States,” the Survey said.
“The NBS rollout was flawed since urea was kept out of its ambit, which has defeated the objective of balanced use of nutrients,” the Survey explained, adding that under the NBS, as of March 2014, “farmers pay 61 to 75 per cent of the delivered cost of P and K (Phosphatic and Potassic) fertilizers, and the rest is subsidised by the Centre.”
