Indian Agriculture achieves 300 Million tonnes food production: Nitish Singh.

The food and agriculture ministry has announced today that the Production of major crops has reached to record levels in the century, which has estimated to 300 million tonnes in 2019-2020. By this figure the share of agriculture in total GDP has risen to 25%. The Food and Agriculture Minister Nitish Singh has said the record production has been achieved due to development of rural infrastructure and organic farming. But also he added that the spending on the agriculture research need to be increased from current 3% to 5% of GDP. India has achieved annual 2% agricultural growth rate and there has been surplus of food grains in the country for record 5 years. While the agriculture is on high growth, it has provided direct employment to 30% of the population. Then he announced the awards to scientists of CSIR and ICAR for their contribution in the development of organic farming, which resulted in another Green Revolution in the South Asian region. The country's rice production has been estimated to reach to 150 million tonnes. The growth rate of food production has been raised to 5%, which has exceeded the growth of population. This has resulted in increase in per capita food availability from 444 gram a day in 2010 to 800 gram a day in 2020. The country has adopted several reforms in its policy towards agricultural development which has resulted in substantial growth in agricultural products and welfare of the rural sector. Though the government spending has been much reduced by reduction in subsidies being provided on agricultural equipments, there has been phenomenal improvement in the performance of this sector. The foremost attention has been towards building up of the irrigation facility through several schemes funded by Asian Development bank. While the global irrigated area has grown at an average rate of 2% per year, the irrigated lands in India have grown by 3%. The dependence on groundwater has reduced substantially. Now the irrigated land has increased to 80% of the total agricultural land, which has contributed to increased productivity. With the advent of organic farming in the beginning of the decade, there has been significant growth in the production of food grains per area of land, with 30% of land converted to organic farms. There is lesser dependency on fertilizers and related subsidies by the government on them. It has reduced the burden of the government on facilitating these subsidies and let the increase in the savings which could be diverted to development of necessary rural infrastructure. With substantial spending on infrastructure for retailing at mandis and development of farmers cooperatives, community welfare centres have evolved to be the major drivers of the improvement in the rural sector and development of new markets for rural products. Through the training programs to the farmers about handling, storing, transporting, packing etc through several institutes CISR, IISR and ICAR, the stocks have been developed in the local markets. Credit availability for farmers and retail traders have been the major focus of Rural Economic development policies in the decade. There have been establishment of several sustainable financial intermediaries by the NABARD sponsored agriculture credit programs and partnership of participating commercial banks and private financial institutions.