Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union minister of agriculture and farmers’ welfare, said the central government is developing a new scheme to reduce farmers’ transportation costs and ensure higher income for farmers.
Farmers cannot bear transport costs and take their produce to the large markets in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, or Kolkata, so sell cheaply at the farm or nearby mandis, he said. The central government would work with the state governments and consider bearing the transport costs, with agencies procuring from farmers, aggregating the produce, and delivering it to markets in other states, Chouhan said. NAFED and other state agencies could buy the produce, and take it to the markets.
He was speaking here at the platinum jubilee conference of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics’ Agro Economic Research Centre (AERC).
The government was working on increasing storage capacity at the farm and village levels and expanding the network of warehouses to improve the farmers’ holding power and capacity to store the produce and sell at the right time, he said.
Chouhan cautioned against the indiscriminate use of fertilizers and pesticides. It was adding to the cost of production for the farmers, and the way out was to move to natural farming, he suggested. There were other ways to increase production and productivity, but genetically modified crops are not the way ahead for the country, he said. He said there were concerns over the damage to human and land health. “We have to think about future generations,” he said. “Natural farming, if done properly, production and productivity can be increased,” he said.
Chouhan called canal irrigation inefficient and mooted better ways to take water to farms, such as piping and drip irrigation so that farmers could irrigate more with less.
He urged researchers and scientists to move from the lab to the land and connect with farmers so that they could solve problems the agriculture community was facing. As most of the publications and research papers were in English, they were of no use to the farmers. The minister urged publishing them in different Indian languages to bridge the gap between the lab and the land.