NEW DELHI (Commodity Online) : A day after India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha witnessed chaos over leaking a Committee report, the government is on the receiving end again Tuesday as the House’s Estimates Committee criticized it over poor management of food grain production and drought.
The reports tabled at the Lok Sabha Tuesday severely criticized the functioning of various government departments for its poor functioning.
The committee recommended that the farmers in India should be made water literate adding there should be an awareness campaign among farmers on the judicious use of ground water.
The committee felt that ministry should avoid overlapping of certain schemes like Integrated Scheme on Oil Seeds, Pulses and maize and National Food Security Mission (Pulses). Both the schemes are being implemented in 14 states.
It directed the government to "activate its think tank" to take effective measures like giving incentives to farmers "to make growing of sugarcane crop as viable and profitable" to stabilize the production of sugar in the country; and demanded that action taken in this regard should be intimated to the panel.
The committee felt that the government's stand of a "mechanical linkage" of MSP with the cost of production is "not practicable and not acceptable to the committee".
The MSP should always start from Cost of Cultivation Plus 50 % more, as was the formula was suggested by the National Commission on Farmers.
The ministry should also make arrangements for setting up of procurement camps/centres by the FCI instead of leaving procurement of foodgrains to private mill owners.
The committee also said that as against a target for agri credit of Rs 3,25,000 crore fixed for the current financial year, only about 28 per cent of the same has been achieved till April-July 2009.
The ministry should make special initiatives to achieve targets including instructions to public sector banks and agri cooperative banks to reach out to farmers to achieve the agri credit targets.
"Progress made in this regard should be intimated to the committee,” it said.
Since its inception in April, 1950, the Committee has presented 922 Reports covering almost all the Ministries/ Departments of the government of India. Out of these 480 are the Original Reports and 442 are Reports on Action Taken by the government on earlier Reports of the Committee.
