Boosting agriculture growth a major task

New Delhi: Tipped to be agriculture minister, Radha Mohan Singh has an arduous task at hand to boost the growth, which could not meet the target of four per cent per year in recent years.

Also, the El Nino threat to the monsoon rains will be the immediate challenge, which can affect the foodgrains productions in the next financial year.
Even though there has been record foodgrains productions in the past couple of years, the rising input costs have distressed farmers in large parts of the country.

Now that the government will roll out the National Food Security Act, the ministry of agriculture has to ensure that the foodgrains productions remain sustainable. With farmers not making enough money despite reasonable hike in MSP, the officials reckon that there could be shift from the loss making crops, which could hurt some of the schemes of the government.

Also, the rising labour cost and shrinking of the multi-cropped land size due to urbanisation, the new minister has to ensure that the mechanisation of the farming, along with availability of high-quality seeds, are made available to the farmers.

The previous government had taken a few steps to find convergence between the MGNREGA and agriculture, the new government will need to take the efforts to their logical conclusion.