OdishaPlus Bureau
State Cabinet on Tuesday cleared the ‘Samridhi’-Agriculture Policy 2019 with an aim to enhance the status of agriculture from the level of subsistence to a profitable commercial venture so as to lure youth to accept it as a means of self-employment. The State Government had given agriculture a status of Industry and launched Agriculture Policy during 1996.
In 2008, the State Agriculture Policy was revised with wider scopes covering many other aspects of the State’s agriculture and the State Agriculture Policy-2013 added further steps in the same direction.
Samridhi is focused on farmers’ well-being and is formulated to build on the inherent strengths of its agriculture and allied sectors, to address the constraints it faces and to make optimal use of resources and opportunities emerging on account of advancement in technology, and the emergence of accelerated economic growth in the state and the country.
Broadly, the Policy aims at ensuring continuous growth in farmers’ income, making the growth process inclusive of small and marginal farmers, ensuring sustainable, stable and scalable agricultural growth.
The key components of achieving agriculture vision of Odisha are S – Leveraging Science and Technology, A: Adaptation to Climate change, M: Markets (Domestic and global), physical and financial, spot and future, R: Resource use efficiency ensuring higher productivity, I: Creating appropriate Infrastructure, D: Diversification of production to” high-value agriculture, H: Human resource upgrading and skilling and I: Strengthening Institutions.
The policy focuses on creating an ecosystem interlinking inputs-production-markets, sustainable increase in yields of paddy and diversification to high-value agriculture (HVA), encouraging efficient and ecologically sensitive use of inputs mainly water, land, and soil.
Promoting processing which includes cleaning, grading, etc., for better value capture, creating value-chains particularly of vegetables, livestock: dairy and poultry, encouraging aggregation of farmers in farmer producer organizations (FPO), reducing wastages by promoting pre and post-harvest management, adapting to climate change – techniques, technology, and management, leveraging the power of data for planning and monitoring, leveraging different central government schemes.
The policy has dealt with some broad sections – Crop Diversification, Markets, Infrastructure, Value-chains fr Processing, Production & Productivity, Livestock & Fisheries, Research, Development, Extension, Disaster management, Insurance and areas with special focus.
The new Agriculture Policy also encompasses activities in different sectors of fisheries, livestock, procurement, credit, insurance, irrigation, etc. for boosting the overall farmers’ income.