Chief Secretary S.K. Joshi made strong pitch for greater diversity in cropping patterns in the State with focus on supplying quality inputs to farmers enabling them to enhance their productivity.
Emphasis should be on controlling rising cost of inputs and enhancing productivity to ensure that farming becomes profitable. “The concept of per drop more crop should be changed to more crop per unit of input,” he said. The Chief Secretary was speaking at a meeting convened by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) in connection with the release of State Focus Paper for Telangana here on Wednesday.
He said doubling the farmers’ incomes targeted for 2022 by the Central government was not an easy job as there were several hurdles in the agriculture sector. Agriculture requires huge inputs, but it was supporting a limited section of the people resulting in inequities. “Fragmented approach should change for which focus should be on supplying quality inputs and enhancing productivity,” he said.
Farm credit
The State was focussing on convergence of the institutions so as to synergise all efforts in ensuring optimum utilisation of the available resources. Principal Secretary Agriculture C. Parthasarathy underlined the need for providing necessary credit to farm sector as it would act as catalyst in accelerating the development of the sector.
The sector was faced with several challenges in spite of the achievements made in the past few years and effective post production methods had been of prime importance for enhancing the incomes of farmers. “The manner in which land is being fragmented is alarming. The average size of holdings shrunk from three hectares in 1970s to one hectare at present underscoring the need for aggregate farming practices,” he said.
He lamented that the stakeholders and institutions involved had been failing to formulate programme combining agriculture with allied sectors like animal husbandry. While the crop insurance programme was fraught with problems, the non-serious approach of the district consultative committees and district-level review committees too was contributing to making agriculture unviable.
Structural issues
Principal Secretary Finance K. Ramakrishna Rao stressed the need for exploring options for enhancing income from allied sectors including animal husbandry. “We are spending lot of money, but not in a way it needs to be spent and this in turn is not yielding results,” he said.
He said the agriculture sector was under “great degree of distress” and there was need for addressing some structural issues and it needed smart and efficient solutions for realising the target of doubling farmers’ incomes.
Nabard Chief General Manager Vijay Kumar, RBI General Manager Sundaram Shankar and others spoke.
