Budget 2021: ₹75,100 cr allocated for farmers; agriculture credit target raised to ₹16.5 lakh cr

Sitharaman’s announcement comes at a time when farmers have been protesting on the outskirts of the national capital demanding that the government roll back the three new laws they say will hurt their incomes and make farming difficult.

Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her budget speech on Monday ₹75,100 crore has been allocated for the farmers of the country and that the government will target to ensure farm loans worth ₹16.5 lakh crore in the next fiscal year, compared with ₹15 lakh crore announced in 2020-21. Sitharaman’s announcement comes at a time when farmers have been protesting on the outskirts of the national capital demanding that the government roll back the three new laws they say will hurt their incomes and make farming difficult. The announcement could bring some relief to cultivators, who have seen depressed crop prices due to bumper production after plentiful rains.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the MSP regime has undergone a "sea change" to assure price at least 1.5 times of production cost with a sharp increase in procurement of foodgrains and payment to farmers. (PTI Photo)

The finance minister also said that provision to agriculture infrastructure fund outlay will be increased to ₹40,000 crore for ₹30,000 crore and that micro-irrigation corpus will be doubled to ₹10,000 crore. She said the Operation Greens scheme will cover 22 more perishable commodities and also announced that1,000 more mandis will be integrated with the electronic national market and the agriculture infrastructure fund would be made available to Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMCs) to augment infrastructure facilities.

Sitharaman said the Minimum Support Price (MSP) regime has undergone a "sea change" to assure price at least 1.5 times of production cost with a sharp increase in procurement of foodgrains and payment to farmers. She said the procurement of crops like paddy, wheat, pulses and cotton has jumped manifold in the last six years. "Our government is committed to the welfare of farmers. The MSP regime has undergone a sea change to assure price that is at least 1.5 times the cost of production across all commodities. The procurement has also continued to increase at a steady pace. This has resulted in an increase in payment to farmers substantially,” Sitharaman said.

Sitharaman said the amount paid to farmers in case of wheat was over ₹75,000 crore in 2020-21 as she shared the procurement data and amount paid to farmers under MSP operation. "The number of wheat growing farmers that were benefited increased in 2020-21 to 43.36 lakh compared to 35.57 lakh in 2019-20. That much of an increase within one year," the finance minister said.

In case of paddy, she said the amount paid to farmers was estimated to ₹172,752 crore as compared to ₹1,41,930 crore in 2019-20, while in case of pulses, the amount in 2020-21 was estimated at ₹10,530 crore as compared to ₹8,285 crore in 2019-20.

The number of paddy farmers benefitted increased from 1.2 crore in 2019-20 to 1.54 crore in 2020-21, she also said.

Sitharaman said ₹236 crore was paid to farmers in 2013-14 for pulses. "In 2019-20, this was increased to ₹8,285 crore. Now in 2020-21, it is at ₹10,530 crore, more than 40 times increase from 2013-14,” she said. Similarly, ₹90 crore was paid in 2013-14 to cotton farmers while ₹25,974 crore has been paid in 2020-21 as of January 27.

(With agency inputs)