‘Four-pronged strategy to double farmers’ income’

New Delhi, July 2: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said his government has a four-pronged strategy to double farmers’ income by 2022, while reiterating that farmers would be given Minimum Support Price (MSP) of 1.5 times of the input cost for notified crops. Modi also said the farmers would also get more opportunities to get the right price for their crops through the e-NAM initiative. He said there was a need to augment the sources of income and decrease the risks to make the farmers prosperous, for which his government had fixed the aim of doubling their income by 2022. “We are following a four-pronged strategy to achieve the goal of doubling farmers’ income: decrease the input costs, ensure proper prices for the produce, ensure minimal harvest and post-harvest losses, and create more avenues for income generation,” he said. “Not only will the farmers get minimum support price of 1.5 times their cost, they also have more avenues to get the right price with the help of e-NAM (the electronic National Agricultural Market, which provides price, production and market information to farmers),” he said.

The Prime Minister also said the BJP-led NDA government had allocated Rs 2.12 lakh crore to agriculture in the five-year period against Rs 1.21 lakh crore by previous Congress-led UPA government. Modi also said that farmers were “forced” to do farming in unscientific ways during the UPA rule. “To make farming scientific, farmers are now equipped with soil health cards. Shortage and scarcity of urea is a thing of past and neem-coated urea is improving productivity. Now the farmer has a holistic crop insurance cover with PM Fasal Bima Yojana.” Modi also urged the private sector to increase investment in agriculture as its share is only 1.75 per cent of total investment. (IANS)