Budget 2023: Horticulture industry hails Rs 2,200-cr fund for disease-free planting material

Announcing the scheme, the finance minister said, “We will launch an Atmanirbhar Clean Plant Programme to boost the availability of disease-free, quality planting material for high-value horticultural crops at an outlay of Rs 2,200 crore.”

Earlier, the National Horticultural Board raised concerns about the paucity of quality plant material in its annual report of 2020-21. It said the inadequate availability of quality planting material was one of the primary reasons for the low productivity of various horticulture crops in India.

Unlike food crops like rice and wheat, horticulture crops are vegetatively propagated through the process of grafting. The process involves regeneration of tissues of two plants by joining them. The top portion, called scion, is selected from the high-yielding disease-free mother plant and is joined with another plant, called stock. In this way, the good qualities of both the plants are preserved and the offspring would have the best of both.

While this process has many advantages, its main disadvantage is the possibility of fungal infection and bacterial blights spreading fast and wide. In the case of pomegranates, farmers have been compelled to uproot their orchards owing to bacterial blights, which they say have spread from nurseries.

Prabhakar Chandane, president of the All India Dalimb Mahasangh, pointed out 50,000 of the total 2 lakh hectares of the crop had been reduced because of repeated losses caused by bacterial blights. “Thus if quality planting material is made available, the picture can be reversed,” he said.

The problem, Chandane as well as banana grower Prakash Patil said, is the lack of coordination among and control over nurseries. While nurseries have proliferated across the country against the backdrop of the horticulture revolution, neither the state agriculture departments nor agriculture universities have any control over them, they said.

The budget announcement should translate into quality control of planting material. A proper quality-control mechanism for the nurseries should be on the agenda, Chandane and Patil, who is from Jalgaon, said.