The Centre on Wednesday approved the doubling of government guarantee given to lender banks for providing credit limited to the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED).
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has given its nod to increase the guarantee to ₹19,000 crore from existing ₹9,500 crore, and cleared the continuation of the Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) for three years till FY20, with a total outlay of ₹5,500 crore.
The hike in guarantee, an official release said, would help NAFED increase its procurement so that farmers are prevented from resorting to distress sales as prices of almost all pulses and oilseeds are currently below the minimum support price (MSP) notified by the government.
The Cabinet also regularised and extended guarantee given on credit given to the Small Farmers’ Agri-Business Forum for ₹45 crore.
The PMEGP, for which the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) is the nodal implementation agency at the national level, is estimated to create additional employment opportunities for 15 lakh people. Under the scheme, each district in the country will award a minimum of 75 projects that will help traditional artists and and unemployed youth in rural as well as urban areas to set up micro-enterprises.
First launched under the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises in 2008-09, the PMEGP scheme has helped create 4.55 lakh micro-enterprises providing employment to an estimated 38 lakh people with a margin money subsidy of ₹9,564 crore.
Sectoral focus
The Cabinet also gave the green signal to a proposal of the Department of Commerce to give focussed attention to 12 identified service sectors, including accounting and financing, communications, construction, educational, environmental, information technology, tourism, hospitality, educational, logistics and transport.
The initiative is contemplated to increase India’s share in global services exports to 4.2 per cent by 2022 from 3.3 per cent in 2015, Union Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told the media.
A dedicated fund of ₹5,000 crore has been created to support various sectoral action plans to be taken up under this champion services sectors initiative, which would be closely monitored by a committee of secretaries headed by the Cabinet Secretary.
The Cabinet also gave its approval to a new anti-tracking Bill, which Minister for Woman and Child Development Maneka Gandhi said will be tabled in Parliament in the ongoing session. The Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018, she said, puts more emphasis on rehabilitating victims, independent of criminal proceedings initiated against the perpetrators.
Wide scope
This comprehensive law tries to address the issue of trafficking from the point of view of prevention, rescue and rehabilitation, she said. It would cover all forms of trafficking including for forced labour, begging, and for marriage, she added.
Maneka also said the National Investigation Agency will perform the tasks of the Anti-Trafficking Bureau at the national level and a bill will be prepared separately by the Home Ministry for this purpose.
The Cabinet also cleared a slew of bilateral treaties between India and Jordan, whose King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein is currently on a state visit to India.