11 July 2014

Union Budget 2014-15: Agriculture Sector

Union Finance Minister, Arun Jaitely on 10 July 2014 presented Union Budget 2014-15. The Budget 2014-15 was the maiden budget for the newly formed Government of NDA led by PM Narendra Modi.
The Union Government introduced many funds like Agri-tech Infrastructure Fund, National Adaptation Fund, Price Stabilization Fund to improve country’s Agricultural sector.

Highlights

• An amount of 100 crores rupees set aside for Agri-tech Infrastructure Fund.

• 200 crore provided to open Agriculture Universities in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan and Horticulture Universities in Telangana and Haryana.

• A scheme to provide every farmer a soil health card in a Mission mode will be launched.

• 100 crore rupees has been provided for this purpose and additional 56 crores rupees to set up 100 Mobile Soil Testing Laboratories across the country.

• To meet the vagaries of climate change a National Adaptation Fundwith an initial sum an amount of 100 crore rupees will be set up.

• A sustainable growth of 4 percent in Agriculture will be achieved.

• Technology driven second green revolution with focus on higher productivity and including Protein revolution will be area of major focus.

• To mitigate the risk of Price volatility in the agriculture produce, a sum of 500 crore rupees is provided for establishing a Price Stabilization Fund.
• Central Government to work closely with the State Governments to re-orient their respective Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Acts.

• Sum of 50 crores rupees provided for the development of indigenous cattle breeds and an equal amount for starting a blue revolution in inland fisheries.

• Transformation plan to invigorate the warehousing sector and significantly improve post-harvest lending to farmers.

Agriculture Credit

• To provide institutional finance to landless farmers, it is proposed to provide finance to 5 lakh joint farming groups of Bhoomi Heen Kisan through NABARD .

• A target of 8 lakh crore rupees has been set for agriculture credit during 2014-15.

• Corpus of Rural Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) raised by an additional 5000 crore rupee from the target given in the Interim Budget to 25000 crores rupees.

• Allocation of 5000 crore rupee provided for the Warehouse Infrastructure Fund.

• Long Term Rural Credit Fund to set up for the purpose of providing refinance support to Cooperative Banks and Regional Rural Banks with an initial corpus of 5000 crore rupees.‰

• Amount of 50000 crore rupees allocated for Short Term Cooperative Rural Credit.

• Sum of 200 crore rupees for NABARD’s Producers Development and Upliftment Corpus (PRODUCE) for building 2,000 producers organizations over the next two years.
Food Security

• Restructuring FCI, reducing transportation and distribution losses and efficacy of PDS to be taken up on priority.

• Government committed to provide wheat and rice at reasonable prices to the weaker sections of the society.

• Government when required will undertake open market sales to keep prices under control.