Representatives of agriculture and rural development sectors including that of cooperatives submitted suggestions to boost investment in the agricultural sector and enhance market access to farmers in the Pre-Budget Consultations held by Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
Along with the Finance Minister, the meeting was attended by Anurag Thakur, MoS, Secretaries of Finance, Economic Affairs, Animal Husbandry, Water Resources, Fisheries, Special Secretary Vasudha Mishra, Chairman, CBDT, Ramesh Chand, Member, NITI Aayog and other senior officials of Ministry of Finance.
It was astonishing that the participation of the co-op sector was restricted to just two individuals- N Satayanarayan from NCUI and Manish Gupta from IFFCO. Given 2-3 minutes to present their points the duo tried their best to impress the gathering.
NCUI’s CE N Satyanarayan, among other things, said that PACS are an important tool through which we could help in tackling rural issues. He said viable PACS need to be converted into nodal agencies for both input and output needs of the farming community.
Marketing of agri produce, organic farming and latest know-how of modern farming were some of the other issues put forth by the NCUI before the gathering.
IFFCO representative Manish Gupta highlighted the issues being faced by big Agro processing industries. “While units with less than Rs 100 crore are being favoured in the name of the priority sector, the same is not true of bigger units”, Gupta said in his presentation.
Manish Gupta also raised the issue of GST refund for food processing units. Lastly, he tried to draw the attention of Ministers and others to the need of encouraging seaweed cultivation. Quoting from the experience of Sagarika, he said while IFFCO is able to grow sea-weed in the water around Tamil Nadu, efforts by the co-op giant to do the same in other states are meeting with stiff resistance.
The main areas of discussion during the meeting included agricultural marketing reforms, organic & Natural farming, Agricultural Commodity Markets & future trading, storage infrastructure for agricultural produce, animal husbandry, Agro processing industry, ideas for reducing food subsidy, among other things.
Some of the representatives also suggested further tweaking of e-NAM, developing agro medicinal forestry, fiscal incentives for farmers with primacy to soil health, crop diversification viz-à-viz agro climatic suitability, revisiting of Food Security Act, incentives for promotion of organic farming, extending subsidy to the producers of green manure, bio-fertilisers & bio-pesticides and steps for promoting large scale production of compost by utilisation of urban solid waste.
Besides cooperatives, representatives of CII, Grahak Panchayat, South Indian Sugarcane Farmers Association, Bharat Krishak Samaj, Kisan Foundation, Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, Ashok Gulati, Infosys Chair Professor (ICRIER), among others were present. Harsh Kumar Bhanwala, Chairman, NABARD was also present.
