Staff Reporter / New Delhi
Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar today held a meeting with states through video conferencing to deliberate upon the recent initiatives taken by the Government to boost rural economy.
Mr Tomar released a booklet on new operational guidelines for formation and promotion of 10 thousand Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) at this juncture. The key implementation issues were discussed during interaction with the states.
Addressing on the occasion, Mr Tomar thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for allocating 20 lakh crore rupees package for ‘Atma- nirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan’. He said, one lakh crore rupees financing facility has been allocated for establishment of Agriculture Infrastructure Projects at farm-gate and aggregation points which are Primary Agricultural Cooperative Societies, Farmers Producer Organizations, Agriculture entrepreneurs and Start-ups. He said, the fund will be utilized for creating post-harvest infrastructure to avoid wastage of crop produce, which is about 15 to 20 per cent of total yield at present.
The Minister further emphasized that Kisan Credit Card, KCC saturation drive was initiated by the Government and target of issuing 2.5 crore KCCs by the end of year is set under the ‘Atma-nirbhar Bharat’ campaign. Referring to the PM-Kisan Yojana and Kisan Credit Cards (KCC), he said that out of around 14.5 crore operational farm landholdings, data on around 10.5 crore has been collected so far under PM-Kisan. There are about 6.67 crore active KCC accounts presently. After the KCC saturation drive was started in February 2020, about 95 lakh applications have been received, out of which 75 lakh applications have been sanctioned.
The Minister also stated that total 10 thousand Farmers Producer Organizations FPOs are to be formed till 2023-24 and support to each FPO is to be continued for five years. The cost of proposed scheme is six thousand eight hundred 66 crores. He assured that all the necessary help and support would be rendered to the states to accelerate agriculture infrastructure development, promotion of FPOs and extending credit facilities to the farmers through KCC.
The meeting was attended by Ministers of State for Agriculture Parshottam Rupala and Kailash Chaudhary, Agriculture Ministers of almost all the states and senior officers of the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare.