New incentives for women and poor farmers

The government proposes to provide land rights to women and better access to the credit facility, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 7, 2007, 20:23:02 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In a bid to bring in equity in agriculture, the government has proposed providing land rights to women and better access to the credit facility. It also wants a separate economic growth strategy for the rural poor. The proposal is likely to be discussed at the next full Planning Commission meeting slated for May 14.

Planning Commission has told the government that women could turn the dipping agriculture growth upside down, if provided with ‘right’ incentives. In a recommendation submitted to Prime Minister’s Office, the commission vice-chairperson Montek Singh Aluwalia has suggested the government should provide infrastructure support to women farmers. “They should have access to technical knowledge and marketing outlets like other farmers,” the commission told the PMO.

For the poor farmers, the government is considering a scheme where the poor can access land from those who wish to leave agriculture. To enable this, the government wants to provide credit facility to the poor to take the land on lease. “We should ensure that the poor do not get further excluded as result of contingencies, whether natural or part of economic growth strategy,” a commission official said.

The government officials feel such incentives would improve government input in the agriculture sector which has fallen from 3.39 per cent in 1976-1980 to just 1.89 per cent in 2001-2003. Although the private investment has increased to 4.8 per cent from 3.6 per cent during the period, the agriculture is still dependent on huge government subsidies, the commission’s note to the PMO says.

The government has proposed to increase investment in the agriculture sector in the 11th five year plan. From Rs 96,724 crore in the 10th plan, it is likely to be increased to Rs 2.21 lakh crores. By doing this, the government would cover 118 million hectares of land for irrigation under the state or central government schemes.

Most of the area, the official said, would be rain fed agriculture land as it has witnessed the worst negative agriculture growth in the last decade or so. “The irrigation facilities have not increased in pace with the increasing rain-fed agriculture zone,” the official point out. If agriculture has to grow at four per cent rate, he said, the rain-fed areas would have to be targetted.

The government is also expected to discuss new policy initiatives in the next Monday’s full Planning Commission meeting. The agriculture ministry is expected to bring in a proposal in this regard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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