'Change India' pins initiatives to transform india's agri

‘Change India’ is an agenda for the next Prime Minister. In the seventh show of CNBC-TV18’s ‘Change India’ series, ten policy initiatives that will enable the next Prime Minister to transform India's stagnant agriculture sector have been discussed.Agriculture employs more the 50 percent of India's work force. These initiatives have been culled from the recommendations made by a group of experts and you can get all the details from our website thinkindia.in.com.Joining us are three of these distinguished contributors. We have Professor Yoginder Alagh one of the country's top agricultural economists, a prominent policy maker. Ajay Vir Jakhar, Chairman of the Bharat Krishak Samaj, a non-partisan farmers’ forum, Nitin Puri - President Food and Agriculture Strategy at Yes Bank and with them is Dhiraj Nayyar - CEO of Network18’s Think India Foundation who has anchored this project for us.Some of the audience has actively pitched into the debate on twitter and on our websites. I would urge all of you to contribute to future additions on twitter and our website and we would be delighted to invite you to participate in the upcoming shows. Do note that we will present our suggestions on agriculture and 13 other policy areas to the next Prime Minister who takes office in June.So, here are the first three points for the Prime Minister which are all related to loosening the effect of quantitative controls on agriculture, whether in terms of prices or in terms of supply and distribution. So, point number one is – it is a fairly radical one; sometimes policies in India becomes ritualistic. We are saying the minimum support price (MSP) policy has now out lived its utility. Abolish it, moved instead to income support for poorer farmers, farmers who need that. Our point number two is also about free markets. We are saying you must not have any more export bans; you must not ban futures markets because sometimes the government when it faces a crisis moves quickly to ban exports or to put a ban on futures markets. We are saying please don't do that; let both of these function normally. Point number three is about abolishing the Agricultural Produce. What is happening in India is that we are moving away from an emphasis just on rice and wheat to a diversifying economy which in other words means that support has to be not only in rice and wheat and not only in favoured region favoured crop; it has to be – if you’re growing at eight percent which you should grow, if this year you are not then if your income elasticity of demand is more then one which is true for milk, fruits, vegetables demand growing by 14-15 percent and even poultry. Now market support is extremely important; in the sense that the kisan is moving over to where the demand is. The big labour movement in the kisan in the last census was to what it’s called census towns, which are basically smaller towns. He is moving from villages to places where there is this demand. Now we have to support them there. Four crore farmers have moved into markets in these small towns. Earth satellite pictures show we are one of the greatest spread of these markets. It’s not the APMC, that's where you want to give support and that is the concept of income support. It has to be much bigger then the MSP but I would say don't knock the MSP until you have got the other thing.