Panel on legal guarantee of MSP may submit report by November

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The Sanjay Agarwal captained the board Minimum Support Price (MSP) Crop diversification is likely to submit its report by November, sources said, adding that they had not yet decided whether it would be an interim or final report because the task was much larger.

However, Binod Anand, general secretary of the Confederation of Non-Governmental Organizations for Rural India (CNRI) and a member of the committee, declined to comment when asked if the report would be submitted before December. Anand, who spoke to the media on Thursday, appreciated the Cabinet’s decision to raise average yields for Kharif crops by 5-10 percent and suggested using Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) in direct purchase of rice and wheat from farmers.

Also read: Life After the Farm Laws: The Way Forward

other tasks

Eight months after announcing the repeal of the farming laws, in July last year the center set up a 29-member committee, as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to look at how to make the marine farming scheme more effective and transparent. Besides, she is tasked with proposing measures to promote natural zero-budget agriculture and diversify crops to meet the changing needs of the country.

Although farmers are calling for MSP to be enforced through a law, making it mandatory for anyone not to buy below those benchmark rates for certain agricultural crops, the terms of reference pointed to the committee for proposing to “make MSP available to farmers in the country by making the system more efficient and transparent.” There was no mention of the Panel’s term of office under which the report should be submitted.

However, the sources said the committee will study the practicality of giving more autonomy to the Committee on Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) and propose measures to make it more scientific. Sources said he is likely to propose reforms in the agricultural marketing system to ensure higher value for farmers for their produce.

Encouraging agricultural exports

The committee will also propose programs and plans to develop the value chain and to expand the area under the natural farming system. Besides, the current cropping patterns of the agro-ecological zones of the producing and consuming countries will be mapped separately until a system is put in place to ensure remunerative prices for the sale of diversified crops.

Anand said the government has doubled the MSPs of many crops like jowar, bajra, ragi and niger seed than in 2013-14, while many other crops have seen a rise of 70% to 90% in the last nine years, which is significant. .

He said India needed a dynamic trade policy to boost agricultural exports. Issues related to agricultural export infrastructure, agricultural value chains, sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS), technical barriers to trade (TBT) and traceability, export procedures and documentation should be addressed apart from giving a special push to the export of value-added processed products and organic products.