As per the last Survey conducted by NSSO in India in the year 2013, rural India had an estimated total of 90.2 million agricultural households, which constituted about 57.8 percent of the total estimated rural households of the country during the same period.
This information was given in a written reply by the Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Shri Narendra Singh Tomar in Lok Sabha today.
Majority of the agricultural households which possessed more than 0.40 hectare land, reported cultivation as their principal source of income. Among the agricultural households having less than 0.01 hectare land, about 56 percent reported wage/salary employment as their principal source of income and another 23 percent reported livestock as their principal source of income.
About 44 percent of the estimated agricultural households in the country had MGNREGA job card during the survey period. About 52 percent of the agricultural households in the country were estimated to be indebted.
The Minister said that the Government had constituted an Inter-Ministerial Committee in 2016 to recommend a strategy for Doubling of Farmers’ Income (DFI) by the year 2022.
The DFI Committee submitted its report and thereafter the Government constituted an Empowered Body on 23.01.2019 to monitor and review the progress as per these recommendations.
To achieve this, the Committee has identified seven sources of income growth viz., improvement in crop productivity; improvement in livestock productivity; resource use efficiency or savings in the cost of production; increase in the cropping intensity; diversification towards high value crops; improvement in real prices received by farmers; and shift from farm to non-farm occupations.