HYDERABAD: The doubling the income of farmers by 2022 was possible, if the Agriculture was linked with NREGS, felt Union Rural Development Ministry secretary Amarjeet Sinha.
Participating in a workshop on doubling the farmers' income here on Tuesday, which was jointly organised by Niti Aayog and State Agriculture department, Sinha said that the Central government observed that due to the NREGS scheme the farmers got better remuneration in some states.
Sinha suggested that the income of the farmers could be doubled by reducing the cost of cultivation, providing better marketing facilities and construction of godowns.
The reduction of input costs too would help farmers to get more income, Sinha said. The State governments should think of providing assets to farmers with NREGS funds, the Union secretary said. Sinha added that the wages of agriculture labour were constant, whereas the cost of seeds, fertilisers and pesticides were increased considerably.
Chief Secretary SK Joshi explained various schemes being launched by Telangana for the welfare of farmers like investment support scheme and life insurance scheme. Agriculture principal secretary C Parthasarathi, additional secretary of Ministry of Rural Development Sanjeev Kumar, joint secretary of Union Agriculture Ministry Devesh Chaturvedi, Niti Aayog advisor AK Jain, NIRD director general WR Reddy, Rural Development secretary Vikas Raj and officials form Telangana, AP, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Pondicherry, Andaman and Nicobar were present.
Nine things to be focussed for doubling farmer's income:
Natural resource management
Infrastructure support
Enabling healthy credit environment
Research and development and extension services
Risk management - Integrated approaches.
Marketing strategies
Scaling up and aggregation
Off-farm/ non-form/wage income
Strengthening/ widening partnership ends