Although a record harvest of 206 million tonne of foodgrains transformed the country from an importing nation to an exporting one, the benefits failed to percolate to the growers as many of them sold their produce for a pittance due to inherent weaknesses in the post-harvest management.

It was hunger and poverty in the land of plenty as burgeoning stocks of foodgrains including wheat and rice continued to rot in the open because of acute shortage of storage space in the godowns of the Food Corporation of India (FCI).

The much trumpeted National Agriculture Policy (NAP), first ever since independence, was unfolded by the government to usher in a "rainbow revolution" and make India the largest exporter of agricultural products, but it failed to provide a blueprint or detailed strategy to achieve the objective.

The 15-page document, aimed at achieving a sustained four per cent growth in agriculture in the next 20 years and an average economic growth of 6.5 per cent, may at best be described as an "intent" of the government as it does not spell out any plan of action to meet the ambitious goals.

The year saw a desperate attempt to offload grains lying in the open through exports by tapping the international market.

Having fixed a target of exporting 40 lakh tonne of wheat by March, 2001, the Centre has already received export orders for about five lakh tonne and is exploring potential markets in west Asia, Africa and Bangladesh.

Despite a bumper harvest, wide inter-state and inter-crop variations continued to dominate the agriculture scene as the rate of growth of food production declined from 3.5 per cent in the eighties to about 1.5 per cent.

Though the output of rice at 88.3 million tonne and wheat at 74.3 million tonne registered record levels, there was a sharp decline in the production of pulses and coarse cereals in the country.

In the non-foodgrains segment, major crops like oilseeds-particularly groundnut- cotton and tea registered decline in output during the year, while production of sugarcane, jute and mesta recorded a rise.

Unscientific cropping pattern, largely guided by the farmers' perception of risk and price expectations, and low level of farm mechanisation remained a cause of concern.

One of the major drawbacks of Indian agriculture has been the low level of per hectare yield as compared to other countries due to a number of reasons, including fragmentation of land holdings, subsistence farming, lack of irrigation and paucity of funds.

The agriculture policy proposes to encourage private participation in the sector even as it ensures price protection to farmers in the post Quantitative Restriction (QR) regime from April, 2001.

It also gives a go ahead to contract farming, landleasing, wide coverage of future markets, institutionalisation of farm credit, a strategy for National livestock breeding, priority to rural electrification, introduction of National agriculture scheme and review of tax structure.

However, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's dream of doubling the foodgrain output in ten years would be impossible to achieve without substantial capital injection into the fund starved agriculture sector.

Admitting that the farm sector has consistently been starved of capital, Agriculture Minister Nitish Kumar has said investment requirements in the sector are so large that the public sector alone can not bear the entire burden. This needs to be supported by the private sector.

One of the major reasons for lower public sector investments in agriculture, Mr Kumar says, is the diversion of public funds to subsidies, particularly in areas like power, irrigation and fertilisers.

Investment in agriculture has to be made attractive enough for the corporates to enter the sector in a big way. Mr Kumar says private sector participation should come forward for accelerated technology transfer, capital inflow and for providing assured markets.

The farm credit is likely to be up again this Financial year at Rs 42,000 crore as against Rs 38,000 crore in the previous year.

(PTI)