Government has fixed the target of Rs. 16.50 lakh crore for Ground Level Credit (GLC) to agriculture for 2021-2022. It is an increase of 10% over the previous year’s Rs 15 lakh crore. The target has been fixed considering the performance under GLC flow during 2013-14 to 2020-21.
Objective – This enhancement will further boost the efforts of concessional institutional credit to farmers and is bound to act as an enabler in doubling farmers’ income by reducing the cost of credit.
Note– The target among others was mentioned in the Union Budget 2021-22 by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman while making announcements for the agri-sector.
Background:
The Target of Rs.16.50 Lakh Crore was fixed by analysing the performance under GLC flow during 2013-14 to 2020-21. (i.e.)GLC has nearly doubled from Rs.7.30 lakh crore to Rs.13.92 lakh crore during the period 2013–14 to 2019–20.
Govt. is providing interest subvention to farmers through Interest Subvention Scheme(ISS), through which short term crop loans of upto Rs.3 lakh are provided to farmers at an effective interest rate of 4% per annum. Initially the crop loan is provided at 7% to farmers and additional 3% subvention is given on prompt repayment which brings down the effective rate of interest to 4%.
Other Announcements for Agri-sector
i.The corpus for micro-irrigation has been doubled to Rs 10,000 crore from Rs 5,000 crore.
ii.The allocation for the Rural Infrastructure Development Fund has been increased from Rs 30,000 crore to Rs 40,000 crore.
iii.To encourage value addition, the Operations Greens Scheme that is presently applicable for Tomato, Onion and Potato value chains will be expanded to 22 more perishable products.
iv.Decision has been made to integrate 1000 more mandis with e-National Agriculture Market(e-NAM).
v.The agriculture infrastructure fund has been available to the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) to enhance their infrastructure facilities.
vi.Jal Jeevan Mission(urban) will be launched in all 4,378 Urban Local Bodies(ULBs) to provide universal water supply with 2.86 crore household tap connections to be implemented over 5 years at a cost of outlay of 2 lakh 87 thousand crores.
Recent Related News:
During the National Conference for Rabi Campaign 2020 held on September 21, 2020, a target for the 2020-21 crop year (July-June) or foodgrain production target was set at a record 301 million tones (MT), up nearly 1.5% from the previous year’s output. This decision has been taken on the back of good monsoon rains and higher acreage in the kharif season.
