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Monsoon revival to boost rabi crop: Agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh |
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NEW DELHI: The end season revival of monsoon rains across north, east, west and central regions of the country will help rabi crops planting and production to register an increase over last year, agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh has said.
"The monsoon deficit, which is at 14 per cent now, is expected to narrow down as there are good rains in most parts of the country since the past few days. This will help in crop planting," the minister said at a rabi conference in New Delhi on Tuesday.
He said the area under rabi, or winter, crop production in 2015-16 season is targeted to increase 1.55 per cent year on year at 132.78 million tonnes.
Singh said with better preparation, planting of summer, or kharif, crops was higher in 2015 than the previous year by aropund 2 per cent due to planning and contingency measures prepared by the Central Research Institute.
Farmers will start sowing wheat, maize, mustard, chana, potato, etc., in a fortnight across North India. Water levels in reservoirs are expected to increase, which will aid in winter crop planting.
"Working towards nutritional security, we target to increase area under pulses — pigeon pea, gram, pea and lentils during this rabi season," Singh said, adding that the government might event increase import duty on pulses to protect farmers.
The minister also said that the government was exploring to start procurement of pulses as it does for wheat.
To meet the gap between production and consumption of vegetable oils, cultivation of rapeseed and mustard would be done on over 6-7 million hectare land. "Since, we are surplus in wheat and have large shortfalls of edible oil, replacement of low yielding wheat area with mustard will not only help us in reducing the dependency on import but also provide better return to farmers," said the minister.
Domestic consumption of oilseeds touched 21.06 million tonne during 2013-14, out of which 11 million tonnes were imported for more than Rs 56,000 crore.
To discourage import of oilseeds, the government increased import duty on crude edible oil to 7.5 per cent from 2.5 per cent, and to 15 per cent from 10 per cent in the case of refined edible oil.
India's food grain production in the 2014-15 crop year (June-July) declined 4.66 per cent to 252.68 million tonnes from a record high in the previous year after a poor monsoon and unseasonal rains in February-March affected the output of oilseeds, pulses and wheat.
Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com
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