Govt to set up dairy development fund with corpus of Rs 8,000 cr

Jaitley said that about 40 percent of the small and marginal farmers avail credit from the cooperative structure and the Government is committed to support NABARD for computerisation and integration of all 63,000 functional Primary Agriculture Credit Societies (PACS) with the core banking system of district central cooperative banks. This will be done in 3 years at an estimated cost of Rs 1,900 crores, with financial participation from the state governments to ensure seamless flow of credit to small and marginal farmers.

Elaborating on other pro-farmer measures, the Finance Minister said that a Long Term Irrigation Fund has already been set-up in NABARD and the Prime Minister has announced an addition of Rs 20,000 crores to its corpus which will take the fund to Rs 40,000 crores.

The coverage of Fasal Bima Yojana will be increased from 30 percent of cropped area in 2016-17 to 40 percent in 2017-18 and 50 percent in 2018-19. Jaitley said that the budget provision of Rs 5,500 crores for this Yojana in BE 2016-17 was increased to Rs 13,240 crores in RE 2016-17 to settle the arrear claims. For 2017-18, a sum of Rs 9,000 crores will be provided and the sum insured under this Yojana has more than doubled from Rs 69,000 crores in Kharif 2015 to Rs 1,41,625 crores in Kharif 2016.

Referring to his last year’s budget speech, where the Finance Minister had focused on ‘income security’ of farmers to double their income in 5 years, Jaitley said, that the government will take more steps and enable the farmers to increase their production and productivity and to deal with post-harvest challenges. The coverage of National Agricultural Market (e-NAM) will be expanded from the current 250 markets to 585 APMCs. Moreover, assistance up to a ceiling of Rs 75 lakhs will be provided to every e-NAM market for establishment of cleaning, grading and packaging facilities.