Chouhan’s proven track record, and the BJP winning all 29 Lok Sabha seats in MP, should ensure that agriculture finally has someone to champion its interests in the current regime.
India has, since the 1960s, had a succession of agriculture ministers with both an understanding of, and passion for, the sector — from C Subramaniam and Jagjivan Ram to Balram Jakhar and Sharad Pawar. With Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s appointment as the Union agriculture and rural development minister in the third term of the Narendra Modi government, that tradition stands restored. Chouhan fits the bill. As chief minister of Madhya Pradesh for nearly 17 years, he oversaw the state’s impressive agricultural transformation through improved access to irrigation and investment in rural roads and infrastructure for marketing of produce. These helped catapult it into becoming the country’s second largest wheat producer and contributor to the central grain pool, apart from being No 1 or 2 in crops as diverse as soyabean, maize, chickpea, red lentil, mustard, tomato, onion, garlic, ginger, coriander and fenugreek.
Chouhan’s proven track record, and the BJP winning all 29 Lok Sabha seats in MP, should ensure that agriculture finally has someone to champion its interests in the current regime. The Modi government’s real achievements, whether in highways and road construction or creating a digital payments ecosystem, have been made possible by go-getter ministers, like Nitin Gadkari, and the prime minister himself taking personal interest. The farm sector has suffered the lack of both. The ministry itself has been a victim of fragmentation. With food & consumer affairs, food processing, fertilisers and, more recently, animal husbandry, dairying & fisheries and cooperation being hived off into separate ministries, the agriculture ministry has been reduced to a shell of its former self. Ideally, all these departments should come under the purview of a single ministry and person of stature, allowing for focused policy formulation and decision-making.
As minister, Chouhan’s priorities must be, first, to rid the sector of controls — on exports and stocking of produce, pricing of inputs and introduction of new plant breeding technologies or fertiliser and crop protection products — that discourage private sector investment. These hurt farmers most. The second is to improve input use efficiency so that farmers produce more crop on the same land using less water, nutrients and labour. That also calls for rational pricing of electricity, water and fertilisers, without which farmers will not use these scarce resources judiciously. Last but not least is facing the challenge of climate change, manifested in erratic rainfall and extreme temperature deviations. It requires greater investment in climate-smart breeding and technologies for both adaptation and mitigation.
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First uploaded on: 12-06-2024 at 08:10 IST
