Focus on transforming ideas into action to achieve the goal: Dr Mehta to officers

Jammu: Financial Commissioner, Finance, Dr. Arun Kumar Mehta, today emphasized the officers to focus on transforming their innovative ideas into action to achieve the set goal of ‘doubling farmer’s income’ by 2022.
FC was speaking at a meeting chaired by him to discuss and work out ways and means towards doubling farmer’s income in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir by 2022.
Among others the meeting was attended by Vice-Chancellor SKUAST-J, Prof. RK Gupta; Principal Secretary Planning Development & Monitoring and Information Departments, Rohit Kansal; Director Agriculture Kashmir, Aijaz Andrabi; Director Agriculture Jammu, Inderjeet and other senior officers of agriculture universities and allied departments.
The Financial Commissioner urged upon the officers to make an actionable plan adopting the bottom-up approach taking the concerns of farmers into consideration. He emphasised that a comprehensive and manageable roadmap should be formulated that to improve the overall quality of the produce.
He maintained that 70% of people are associated with the agriculture related activities for their livelihood, so it should be our priority in the scheme of things. He asked the officers to suggest interventions that would yield results on ground and advised them to look for private investors, banking and upcoming investors summit to link corporate with farmers.
Principal Secretary asked the concerned officers to lay emphasis on area specific and need based schemes in Agriculture to increase the income of those associated with this field. He said that agriculture should be made a lucrative enterprise to attract people towards adopting it.
It was informed in the meeting that 9 pronged strategy has been made to realise the goal of doubling farmers income in J&K which inter alia included Crop diversification and introduction of hybrid seeds, expansion of area under vegetable cultivation, adoption of robust market driven agriculture policy, promotion of value addition of certain crops, assured modern irrigation facilities, creation of farm machinery banks at panchayat level, promotion of cottage industries, efficient use of cultivable waste lands and capacity building of farmers with transfer of technology through trainings and exposure visits.
The meeting was further informed that in J&K there are 1193211 Farm Operating Families cultivating a net sown area of 3.90 lakh hectares with irrigated area of 1.34 lakh hectare and unirrigated area of 2.56 lakh hectare.
The meeting was apprised that the proposed interventions will increase cultivable area, enhance produce/hectare of land, hike market rates of this produce besides increasing shelf life of the harvested crop. This would greatly benefit the farmers at lowest level thereby raise their income manifold.
Other participants also put forth their suggestions aimed at to achieve government’s objective of doubling farmer’s income by the year 2022.