Vice Chairman, J&K State Advisory Board for Development of Kissans Daljit Singh Chib today participated in the Regional Conference on Doubling of Farmer’s income held at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.While speaking on the occasion he stressed that to achieve Prime Minister’s vision of doubling the income of farmers by 2022to make them prosperous and self reliant, there is a need to bring into force comprehensive reforms including public and private partnerships. “The need to reform the agricultural sector has never been more crucial given that India is touted to become the most populous nation in the world. Our farmers will have to provide food for roughly 1.30 billion people by 2030 with fragmented land holdings and fast depleting water resources” ,he added.He further stated that during the run up to the Green Revolution and thereafter, the emphasis was always on production and productivity.
Our policies were usually farm-centric and not farmer-centric. This is one of the reasons why there is farmers’ distress despite the fact our country has achieved commendable position in food production. He said that India is either first or second in the world in terms of overall production of many agricultural commodities, but we still need to make efforts for achieving the coveted position in productivity in these commodities.He maintained that for achieving this objective, we will have to devise micro-level action plans to augment farmers’ income from all sources and not just from crop cultivation.He stressed that doubling farmers’ income needs funds at institutional level as well as at enterprise level, for which a robust institutional credit flow mechanism is a must. We have to create a healthy credit environment by enhancing access to credit through technology in an equitable manner. Our resource-scarce farming community such as small and marginal farmers, tenant farmers, share croppers, etc, and farmers in east, centre, northeast and Himalayan regions deserve special attention.