With thousands of farmers protesting at Delhi borders for the last few months, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tried to reassure them in her Budget speech.
She responded by laying down a statement on the Modi government’s track record on grain procurement compared to its predecessors along with a commitment to allow APMCs access to the Rs 1 trillion Agriculture Infrastructure Fund (AIF), part funding for which, along with other initiatives for creating farm storage, will come through an Agriculture Infrastructure and Development (AID) cess.
The cess will be levied on a host of products including petrol and diesel and also gold and other imports, and a part of which will be compensated through a cut in excise and customs duties.
The finance minister also announced that henceforth Centre won’t rely on loans from the National Small Savings Fund (NSSF) to fund its burgeoning food subsidy and instead rely on budgetary transfers.
Outstanding NSSF loans on account of food subsidy stood at over Rs 2,50,000 crore as on March 31, 2020.
That together with the extra allocation for cheap grains under the Garib Kalyan Yojana had pushed up the total outstanding for FCI to almost Rs 5,00,000 crore in FY21, of which around Rs 4,30,914 crore has been provided in the revised estimate.
For FY22, a total of Rs 2,46,616 crore has been provided as food subsidy for Food Corporation of India and also decentralised procurement states. Thus almost wiping off the backlog of loans and dues for the corporation.
This also comes, months after the Centre provided Rs 65,000 crore to wipe off pending fertiliser subsidy.
In addition to this, the Finance Minister also announced an allocation to rural infrastructure development has been increased to Rs 40,000 crore for the next fiscal from Rs 30,000 crore in FY21.
Sitharaman further said 1,000 more mandis will be integrated with the electronic national market and the AIF would be made available to APMCs to augment infrastructure facilities.
The AIF outlay will be increased to Rs 40,000 crore, and micro-irrigation corpus will be doubled to Rs 10,000 crore, she added.
Meanwhile, sharing the procurement data, Sitharaman said that in case of wheat, the total amount paid to farmers in 2013-14 was Rs 33,874 crore while in 2019-20, it was Rs 62,802 crore.
In 2020-21, she said the amount paid to farmers was over Rs 75,000 crore.
"The number of wheat growing farmers that were benefited increased in 2020-21 to 4.336 million compared to 3.557 million in 2019-20. That much of an increase within one year," the finance minister said.
For paddy, Sitharaman said the amount paid in 2013-14 was Rs 63,928 crore. In 2019-20, this increased to Rs 1,41,930 crore. Even better in 2020-21, the minister said this is further estimated to increase to Rs 1,72,752 crore.
Number of paddy farmers benefitted increased from 1.2 crore in 2019-20 to 1.54 crore in 2020-21.
In pulses, Sitharaman said Rs 236 crore was paid to farmers in 2013-14. "In 2019-20, this was increased to Rs 8,285 crore.
Now in 2020-21, it is at Rs 10,530 crore, more than 40 times increase from 2013-14."
Similarly, Rs 90 crore was paid in 2013-14 to cotton farmers while Rs 25,974 crore has been paid in 2020-21 as of January 27.
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