Ploughing private capital in agriculture

From linking innovation with supply of inputs to providing contract farming, private sector can help agriculture move to the next stage of development

The agriculture sector is facing formidable challenges while it is targeted to double farmers’ income in next six years. A road map prepared by NITI Aayog to Double Farmers Income envisages a 16.7 per cent increase each in productivity, efficiency in use of farm input and operations, and area shift in favour of higher value crops and improvement in price realisation in real terms by farmers by 9 per cent by 2022-23 over base year of 2015-16. Three most important challenges to achieve the goal of Double Farmers Income are: Poor state of science and technology in agriculture, inefficient and