Opinion Union Budget 2024: On agriculture, a lack of vision

The Union Budget has received kudos for staying the course on fiscal consolidation, but has also been panned for being short on big ideas. A case in point is the farm sector. Despite Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman listing “productivity and resilience in agriculture” as the first of her nine priorities, there’s little in the proposals that captures the imagination. The plan to “initiate” one crore farmers into natural farming “in the next two years” is a virtual repetition of the budget promises of 2023-24 (to “facilitate” one crore farmers to adopt the same “over the next three years”) and 2022-23 (to “promote” chemical-free farming in 5-km wide corridors along the river Ganga). Building a digital public infrastructure for agriculture to upload the details of farmers and their lands found mention in last year’s budget too. Developing large-scale clusters and supply chains for vegetables was discussed in the 2018-19 budget with reference to an Operation Greens scheme specific to tomato, onion and potato.

The lack of novelty, detail and ambition is striking for a government that, in its previous term, had enacted three major agriculture reform laws. If protests by farmer unions led to their repeal then, the fear of political opposition seems to have precluded any substantive reform action now. There is no attempt at rationalisation of urea prices or redirecting government spending on fertiliser and food subsidies towards investment in farm research, extension, irrigation, market yards and other infrastructure. Sitharaman has stated that the government will undertake a “comprehensive review” of the agriculture research set-up “to bring the focus of raising productivity and developing climate resilient varieties”. But the budget for the department of agricultural research and education has been raised only marginally to Rs 9,941 crore, from Rs 9,877 crore in the revised estimates for 2023-24.

Advertisement

A country with a population expected to peak at 1.7 billion and growing incomes cannot import its food requirements beyond a point. If more has to be produced from less land and per unit of water, nutrients and labour, while coping with climate change, it calls for a long-term plan. The Green Revolution wouldn’t have happened without the investments in the ICAR and state agricultural universities, and irrigation dams, land reforms and consolidation of holdings, by the governments during the 1950s and 1960s. A similar vision is needed today. One would have expected at least some of it in this budget.