Agri research ramp-up to tackle climate impact: FM
Union government prioritizes agriculture in the budget, focusing on farm research to boost productivity and climate resilience, allocating ₹1.52 lakh crore.
NEW DELHI The Union government will ramp up farm research to boost productivity and ability of crops to withstand climate challenges that have upended the country’s food supplies, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said while unveiling the budget, her seventh in a row.
Identifying agriculture as one among nine top priorities, Sitharaman said there would be a “comprehensive review of the agriculture research set-up” to raise productivity and develop “climate-resilient varieties”.
The government was allocating ₹1.52 lakh crore for agriculture and allied sectors, she said. For agriculture alone, the budget has provisioned ₹1.32 lakh crore, up from the interim budget’s allocation ₹1.27 lakh crore.
However, the capital expenditure allocation for the department of farm research stood at ₹6.5 crore out of a total of ₹9,941 crore, which means the bulk of the outlay will go towards revenue expenditure. The revised estimates for 2023-24 showed the government had spent ₹9.96 crore as capex for the farm research department.
While it spent ₹40 crore on climate-resilient agriculture initiative in 2022-23, there has been no allocation for it since 2023-24. Sitharaman, however, said funding will be provided to bolster agricultural research. “Funding will be provided in challenge mode, including to the private sector,” she said. “Domain experts, both from the government and outside, will oversee the conduct of such research.”
The government will introduce 109 high-yielding and climate-resilient varieties of 32 field and horticulture crops, Sitharaman said. Among major schemes, the budget allocated ₹60,000 crore for the PM-Kisan, a cash-transfer scheme, the same as revised estimates in the previous financial year.
In the past five years, agriculture has grown at an average 4.18%, but during 2023-24, it expanded just 1.4% on the back of a poor monsoon. The farm sector employs nearly half the population but is marked by low productivity levels, fragmented landholdings and inadequate marketing infrastructure, the Economic Survey 2024 said on Monday.
The government also plans to set up clusters of vegetable farms around large cities to boost supplies and enhance market access. Efforts are on to raise the output and marketing of pulses and oilseeds for self-sufficiency, she said.
The budget proposal to link digitized land records with farmers’ database on an agri stack will help farmers get loans in a matter of hours, agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan commented. “To increase productivity as well as to reduce input costs, minimum support prices are being continuously increased,” Chouhan said.
The budget had ignored the demand of cultivators for guaranteed prices, farm organisations said. “While farmers have been asking for a legally guaranteed price support, with C2 as the cost component to calculate 50% margin over cost of cultivation, nothing has been provided for this by the government,” Kiran Vissa of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture. C2 is a broader measure of agricultural costs incurred by farmers than the one used by the government.
The government is also pushing farmers towards more chemical-free agriculture for which allocation for the National Mission on Natural Farming for 2023-24 (budget estimates) was ₹459 crore. The revised estimate for the year came to ₹100 crore, pointing to low utilization of funds.
Given that spending on natural farming was low, the budget has allocated ₹365 crore for natural farming for 2024-25. “In the next two years, one crore farmers will be initiated into natural farming,” Sitharaman said.
New announcements in the budget included Jan Samarth-based Kisan Credit Card in five states, assured financing for shrimp farming and exports as well as for setting up a network of nucleus breeding centres for shrimp.
The government will introduce a national cooperation policy to boost the rural economy, Sitharaman said. The Centre will also push digital public infrastructure for agriculture in partnership with states.
The details of 60 million farmers and their land records will be entered into an agri stack database over the next three years, the minister said. Digital technologies for crop estimations will be undertaken in 400 districts from the current summer season.
While agriculture tends to swing from one problem to the other, India’s 140 million farmers are increasingly battling extreme weather said to be linked to climate change. Heatwaves shriveled wheat crops in the world’s second-largest grower in 2022 and 2023, stoking food prices. In June, food prices rose a sharp 9.6%, official data show.
A landmark study by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in 2018 found that every ₹10 lakh invested in farm research potentially pulled 328 people out of poverty, while only 26 people were helped by the same amount spent on subsidies. Likewise, every ₹1 spent on agricultural research increased farm GDP by ₹11.2, the study showed.
The budget kept the fertiliser subsidy at ₹1.64 lakh crore, the same as proposed in the interim budget and lower than the ₹1.88 lakh crore in 2023-24 (revised estimate). Food subsidy has been set at ₹2.05 lakh crore, the same as in the interim budget, but lower from the revised estimates of ₹2.12 lakh crore during 2023-24.