New Delhi, October 27
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today called for a second Green Revolution to achieve an annual farm growth rate of 4 per cent while making efforts to move people outside the farm sector either to manufacturing or services.
“We need to aim at an agricultural growth of 4 per cent if we have to achieve our ambition of over-all economic growth rate of over 8 per cent per annum,” he said while inaugurating a national conference on Krishi Vigyan Kendras here.
“This is not impossible. We grew at almost 7 per cent last year, and this year, too, we expect the growth to be in excess of 7 per cent,” the Prime Minister said.
“If one looks at the overall macro-economic scenario in the country today, I see that the environment is quite favourable for accelerating our growth rate to beyond 8 percent,” he said.
Farm output, generating about a fifth of the GDP, grew to an annual 2 per cent in April-June compared with 1.8 per cent in the previous three-month period and 3.8 per cent a year ago.
He said farm growth was not picking up, with the average agricultural growth rates of just 1.5 per cent since 2002/03 (April-March) and this year’s growth projection was based on forecasts of less than 2 per cent agricultural growth.
But the farm sector is dogged by poor productivity and excessive dependence on the monsoon because of lack of irrigation facilities. Although the contribution of agriculture to the GDP had declined over the years, the proportion of the population dependent on it had not come down.
“We need to usher in a second Green Revolution. Agricultural sciences would have therefore to work towards providing the technological basis for new breakthrough,” Dr Manmohan Singh said.
He expressed the need for providing farmers with crop specific, region specific, resource specific and farm specific solution to achieve this objective.
