Agri Minister rejects proposal ‘but Spain trip of officials still on’

Minister for Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Chander Kumar has rejected a proposal regarding a trip of officials of his department to Spain to study agriculture practices. The team was to go to Spain under a project of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The minister said that he had rejected the proposal. He added, “When the proposal file was put before me, I asked the officials to first submit a report on the benefits accrued from earlier foreign visits. Department officials had visited Netherlands earlier. As per my knowledge, Netherland is known for floriculture and not agriculture. I am not against visits to a foreign country for learning new farm practices, but they should also justify what benefits earlier visits have brought for the farmers of the state.”

Chander Kumar said, “I have asked the department officials to make Himachal a model state in agriculture so that people from foreign countries come here to learn our farm practices rather than we visiting abroad at the cost of the public exchequer.”

Meanwhile, the BJP has claimed that the minister had rejected the proposal but the foreign visit was still on. Sanjay Sharma, state BJP spokesperson, said that the visit of 11 officials of the Agriculture Department to Spain under a JICA project was scheduled for the second week of October. “This shows that the bureaucrats are ruling the roost in the state as even when the minister had rejected the proposal, they managed the trip at the cost of the public exchequer,” he added.

Chander Kumar said the proposal file had not come again to him for approval. “The BJP has no business to comment on the administrative matters of the present government. The decay of public institutions had started during the previous BJP government,” he added.

Sharma said that these days, a JICA delegation from Japan was in Himachal Pradesh to review the progress of the project. “It would have been better had the department officials met the delegation from Japan and worked for the welfare of the state and the farmers,” he added.

He said that the JICA project was started in 2021 during the tenure of the BJP government led by Jai Ram Thakur. “This project being operated by the governing board of the Himachal Pradesh Agriculture Development Committee will continue in the state till 2029. A total of Rs 1,010.30 crore is to be spent on it,” he added.