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‘85 p.c. of ryots will not benefit from new agriculture policy’

BHUBANESWAR: A day after Naveen Patnaik government announced its agriculture policy doling out a lot of promises, former Finance Minister and Samrudha Orissa leader Panchanan Kanungo on Sunday hit out saying there was hardly any time left for this government to implement it.

“The present government is going to complete its term within next six months. Since 2003, the State had been managing without a policy while the Chief Minister announced different agricultural packages at frequent intervals,” Mr. Kanungo said at a press conference here.

He said 85 per cent of farmers, mostly small and marginal, in the State would not get any benefit from the new policy as the subsidy announced by the government was meant for big farmers and on modern implements such as tractors and tillers. Although the government had failed to manage its existing agricultural infrastructure such as cold storage, the new policy envisaged setting up of one such storage in every panchayats, Mr. Kanungo ridiculed.

Of the 37 cold government-run cold storages, hardly six to seven were functioning, he said. Most of promises reflected in the manifesto and packages announced by Biju Janata Dal and Bharatiya Janata Party alliance government earlier were far from being fulfilled, the former finance minister said.

A package announced by Mr. Patnaik in 2006 promised to achieve seed replacement rate (SRR) of 18 per cent by 2008-09, however the present SRR was estimated to be 10 per cent, he said. Mr. Kanungo said on the contrary to the State government’s claim that it would extend irrigation facilities to 35 per cent land in every block, the coverage of irrigation had actually shrunk by five lakh hectares. While 11,000 lift irrigation projects out of total 15,000 were lying defunct, the farm pond scheme of the present government had failed to benefit small and marginal farmers, he said.

Moreover, time and again this government had promised to take panchayat as unit for insuring of crop damage, the latest policy was not clear on this front, he said.

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