WB approves $250-mn farm innovation plan

The World Bank has given an in-principal approval to the $250-million National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) to be launched in July 2006.

It has also allowed 10 per cent of the proposed funds to be allocated in advance to the projects to be taken up under the NAIP. The projects will be implemented by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

ICAR Director-General Mangala Rai said this project would take forward the achievements of the World Bank-aided National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP) that had ended recently.

The NATP was the world's largest project of its kind supported by the bank. The approval of the NAIP reflects the satisfaction of the bank with the results achieved under the NATP.

Beginning July, the project will continue for more than five years and co-exist with the full term of the 11th Plan. Negotiations on the details of the projects and actual research and development programmes to be taken up under the NAIP were proposed to be completed by the next month as desired by the World Bank, the ICAR chief said.

Rai said while the NATP had reoriented the country's approach to agriculture research from individual crops to cropping systems, the NAIP would include post-harvest handling, value-addition, storage, transportation and even marketing and utilisation by the end-users.

"Thus, it will encompass the whole chain from production to consumption, rather than leaving it at production," he said.

He said the ICAR was already laying stress on research on farming systems (integrated crop, livestock, fisheries production systems) so that farmers' overall returns could be boosted. The NAIP will extend it beyond this and will try to seek multi-disciplinary solutions to the problems of farmers.

It will cooperate and collaborate with the research institutions of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian institutes of technology (IITs) and international research institutes being run by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

He also said the Cabinet had cleared a proposal to raise India's contribution to the CGIAR from the present $2.5 million a year to up to $10 million. This move may persuade countries to donate more to this body which funds and guides the work being done by global research centres.

Many of the existing international institutes are currently facing a resource crunch and need additional funding through higher donations by supporting countries.

The developing countries have been the main beneficiaries of the CGIAR institutes' research on different aspects of agriculture.