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Madhya Pradesh agriculture (Rajarshi Mitra/Wikimedia Commons)
You can also read this article in Hindi- कृषि के लिए उचित घोषणापत्र- किसान और उपभोक्ता केंद्रित समाधान
Our policy architecture will make agriculture a remunerative enterprise for the farmers by:
1) Capturing the value offered by the changing patterns of food consumption and other end uses of farm produce through demand-driven production
(2) By mitigating the inherent production risk arising out of changing climate and rapidly depleting natural resources, through climate-resilient farming, and
(3) By designing farmer-centric interventions, with the conviction that one scheme or solution does not serve the purpose of all farmers across the country.
Demand-Driven Production
The evolving consumer needs such as quality, health, nutrition, safety, variety and convenience offer a great opportunity to diversify farm production to more remunerative crops like vegetables, fruits, nutri-cereals (millets), pulses, and the derived products like milk and meat. To gain from this opportunity, farmers need access to new knowledge in crop management and efficient linkages to input and output markets. To accelerate this, we will:
Climate-Resilient Farming
As it is, Indian agriculture is largely rain dependent, with only a part of the cropped area having access to reliable irrigation. Increasingly, extreme weather episodes have become more frequent, adversely impacting production. Moreover, natural resources like ground-water and top-soil are fast depleting. To make our farming more resilient and sustainable, we will:
Farmer-Centric Interventions
Indian farmers are as diverse as the country — large and small, land-owning and tenant, men and women, old and young, risk-taking and risk-averse, and so on. While we have to nurture the large and medium to be globally competitive, we also need to protect the small and marginal in their subsistence farming. To enable every farmer to prosper, we will:
This three-pronged strategy will (1) raise farmer incomes substantially and sustainably, (2) kick off an entirely new sector in the form of agri services, and (3) make India food and nutrition secure.
Sivakumar Surampudi is Divisional Chief Executive of the Agri Business Division at ITC.
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