Letters: Don't dilute the focus

The Union Budget's focus on the farm sector and rural India is a most welcome move. As non-urban India accounts for the bulk of the poor and disadvantaged in India, we need to sustain the drive for several years and get the states to participate since many of the required actions come within their jurisdiction.

While extending irrigation, insurance and rural credit facilities are all good plans, the emphasis should be on crop diversification, research on crop varieties requiring less water and fertilisers, agricultural product storage, marketing, handling and transport systems. This way, farm productivity will improve, post-harvest losses and damage will be minimised and growers will get a bigger share of the final retail price. Only then will rural income grow and we will have a healthier community that saves more. This will also mitigate the need for food subsidies.

The goal of doubling rural income, presumably on a per capita and inflation-adjusted basis, by 2022 means a 10.5 per cent per annum growth. This is an ambitious target, but the deadline is well beyond the term of the present government. The deadline should have been set for 2018-19 so that people could judge if the government was on track by the time of the next general elections in 2019.

Focus on the rural sector should not become a tool for the ruling parties to garner votes in Assembly elections and be forgotten when that pressure is off.

P Datta Kolkata

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