The State Cabinet on Tuesday approved State Agriculture Policy 2019, named ‘SAMRIDHI’ to boost the farming sector and farmers income.
The Cabinet, which met under chairmanship of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, gave its nod to the policy which is aimed at ensuring continuous growth in farmers’ income, making the growth process inclusive of small and marginal farmers, ensuring sustainable, stable and scalable agricultural growth,
The policy was named SAMRIDHI in view of its key points of leveraging science and technology, adaptation to climate change, markets (domestic and global), physical and financial, spot and future, resource use efficiency ensuring higher productivity, creating appropriate infrastructure, diversification of production to' high value agriculture, human resource upgrading and skilling and strengthening institutions.
The policy focuses on creating an ecosystem interlinking inputs-production - markets, sustainable increase in yields of paddy and diversification to high value agriculture (HVA), encouraging efficient and ecologically sensitive use of inputs mainly water, land and soil. It would promote processing which includes cleaning, grading, etc., for better value capture, create value-chains particularly of vegetables, dairy and poultry and encourage aggregation of farmers in farmer producer organisations (FPO).
The policy has also dealt some broad sections i.e. crop diversification, markets, infrastructure, value-chains 8t processing, production and productivity, livestock and fisheries, research, development, extension, disaster management, insurance and areas with special focus.
The policy also encompasses activities in the sectors of fisheries, livestock, procurement, credit, insurance, irrigation, etc., for boosting the overall farmers’ income.