CACP backs subsidy tool for hybrid rice use

The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), the government’s main advisory body on pricing policy for farm produce, has favoured a subsidy mechanism to encourage use of hybrid rice varieties.

The commission’s views are likely to be a part of the recommendations it plans to send to the government on pricing of farm produce.

“China has gone ahead in hybrid rice and around 63 per cent of its total area is under hybrid rice, while in India, it is just three per cent, which needs to be encouraged,” CACP Chairman Ashok Gulati told Business Standard.

He said representatives of private seed companies had been invited for a meeting to judge their views as well. In India, paddy is cultivated in 37 to 40 million hectares of land annually. Out of this, just three per cent is under hybrid rice.

Gulati said the biggest success stories in Indian agriculture in the last decade were in cotton and maize. He attributed the success to seeds and said the same needed to be replicated in hybrid rice, as it was India’s first staple crop.

Paresh Verma, director of research at Shriram Bioseed Genetics India, said though hybrid rice seeds cost around Rs 170 per kilogram, while that of normal varieties cost around Rs 20 per kg, this was neutralised if one compared seed distribution and yield.

“In case of normal variety of rice seeds, you need around 20 kg per acre, while for hybrids, you need just six kg per acre,” Verma, who is also a governing council member of the National Seed Association of India, said. In the long-run, farmers can get Rs 6,000-6,500 extra per acre by using hybrid rice varieties, he said.

According to the Economic Survey of 2010-2011, the per hectare yield of coarse cereals grew 3.97 per cent between 2000-01 and 2009-10, while the growth was 1.62 per cent between 1980-81 and 1989-90.

While the growth in per hectare yield of rice dropped from three per cent in 1980s to 1.61 per cent between 2000-2001 and 2009-10, the growth in per hectare yield of wheat dropped from three per cent between 1980-81 and 1989-90 to around 0.69 per cent from 2000-01 to 2009-10.

“The best way to increase farmer’s income is by raising productivity. Otherwise, agriculture will become inefficient,” said Gulati.