A Vision - Or A Dream

Zero Budget Farming, more rural infrastructure and rural jobs are the FM’s magic mantras for obliterating agrarian distress. Will they work?

- Prabodh Krishna

WHEN NIRMALA SITHARAMAN stepped into former Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s big boots, she apparently chose to follow in his footsteps — at least in terms of strategies adopted for agriculture. Many experts on India’s agrarian economy are convinced that Sitharaman’s Budget was little more than an extension of the Interim Budget tabled in Parliament by Piyush Goyal, while Jaitley was convalescing after his surgery. The Interim Budget before the general elections seems to have served as a vision statement for the first Budget of the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) reinstated in government by an adulating electorate.

Sitharaman did leave her stamp though, with her focus on ‘Zero Budget Farming’, which is not too remote from organic farming, and her special emphasis on job creation in rural India. The emphasis on building rural infrastructure was a hand-me-down from the Interim Budget.

The BJP Election Manifesto too had highlighted rural infrastructure, pledging an annual investment of Rs 5 lakh crore for it. In her Budget speech, Sitharaman announced that the “Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana Phase 3 envisages to upgrade 1.25 lakh km of road length at an estimated cost of Rs 80,250 crore.”

The enhanced allocation is not just for rural roads. Sitharaman has actually gone beyond the Interim Budget in her gross allocation for agriculture and rural development (please see chart). The most interest proposal was no doubt, the call to cultivators to return to the basics with Zero Budget Farming. The catchphrase ‘Zero Budget Farming’ was popularised by Subhash Palekar, a farmer from Vidarbha. Palekar has been awarded the Padma Shri for his path-breaking methods of cultivation in a region where farmers are perpetually in distress.