Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh has written to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting to revert the sharing pattern between the Centre and the States to 90:10 for various agriculture development programmes in order to avert the looming crisis in the farm sector.
Stressing the serious need to revert to the earlier sharing pattern to improve farm income, make agriculture more sustainable and promote crop diversification, Capt Amarinder said: “The target of doubling farmers’ income in five years appears almost unachievable unless urgent steps are taken to redirect the focus and provide the essential institutional support.”
Underlining Punjab’s role as the epicentre of the Green Revolution in the country, the Chief Minister said that while there had earlier been huge increase in productivity of food grains and in arable area under wheat and paddy, the production potential of these crops with the currently available technology had been fully exploited.
On the one hand, growth in productivity and real farm incomes had materially slowed down, and on the other, the very sustainability of the rice-wheat cropping system is under threat due to over-exploitation of natural resources, like soil and water, he added.
In the circumstances, said Capt Amarinder, there was urgent need for diversification. However, he pointed out that the sharing pattern of the major agricultural development programmes — Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY), Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture (MIDH), Sub-Mission on Agricultural Mechanisation (SMAM), National Food Security Mission (NFSM), Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA) schemes etc — had been regularly and repeatedly amended.
“States have now been asked to contribute 40 percent of the outlay as State share, even though they lack financial resources and capacity to alleviate farmers’ distress on their own, with Punjab being no exception,” he observed.
With farmer distress across India continuously increasing due to various factors, including weather aberrations and fall in commodity prices internationally, Punjab had been requesting that the sharing pattern between Centre and States should be reverted to 90:10, as that would facilitate their efficient implementation and encourage investments in agriculture, he said.
Further, instead of providing tightly compartmentalised interventions under various programmes, more flexibility should be provided to the States in designing interventions keeping in view their area-specific requirements, said Capt Amarinder.
These measures, it was felt, would contribute in improving the economic viability and ecological sustainability of farming and thereby, help in checking the prevailing distress in the farm sector, the Chief Minister submitted in his letter to the Prime Minister.