Mint Primer: Will the budget bring prosperity to rural India?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The budget announced a slew of schemes for rural India, focusing on improving crop productivity and credit access for farmers. But funding for most non-farm schemes has declined in real terms.
How will this impact income and consumption demand? Mint explores. There’s a new scheme to improve crop productivity and credit access in 100 under-performing districts. But there is no separate fund and the scheme will be implemented by converging existing ones.
A host of national missions were announced on cotton, pulses, fruits and vegetables and high-yielding seeds but together they received a modest ₹2,100 crore, not enough to make a difference. Despite rising weather-related risks to production and farm revenue, the budget cut funding for the flagship crop insurance scheme by ₹3,600 crore. Despite a focus on yields, funds for research were raised by only ₹300 crore.
Read more: TCA Anant: The budget represents a missed opportunity to strengthen Indian statistics Between 2019 and 2024, workers engaged in agriculture shot up by 68 million. This depressed wages and per-worker productivity. Currently, farmers are selling crops like soybean, groundnut, moong and lentils at less than minimum support prices (MSP).
Under the newly announced pulses mission, the budget promised to procure three varieties of pulses at MSP. However, the allocation for PM-AASHA, the scheme under which the government supports farm-gate prices, has only seen a paltry ₹500 crore increase. There is no immediate upside to farm incomes from budget allocations.
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