Innovate to empower agriculture : Kalam

New Delhi, Jun 5 (UNI) President A P J Abdul Kalam today called for enhancing the income of the farmers and farm workers, providing non-farm avenues of employment to the rural people and progressively increasing agricultural productivity for enhancing its GDP contribution to the national economy.

Delivering his special address at the National Symposium on ''Agriculture Cannot Wait:New Horizons'' organised by National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), Dr Kalam suggested for establishment of 50,000 dynamic agricultural service centres with B Sc Agriculture graduates and deploying them to cover 100 million hectares of agriculture land in the country (one agriculture service provider for 2,000 hectares) with the objective of doubling the food productivity in that land in partnership with the farmers.

He also dwelt on empowered Agricultural service centres duly supported by a two tier system through expert teams at the district level and the national level.

The President suggested that rural cooperatives may be formed with the objective of creating exportable processed foods based on the core competence of each region and non-farm products.

The cooperatives can create a knowledge centers in the villages based on e-Choupal or Village Knowledge Centre model to link the farmers directly to the agri-food exporters for marketing the products. Agricultural service centre personnel should become resource personnel for this supply-chain management, he added.

Dr Kalam said that industries located in the regions could create strategic partnership with the farmers as in the case of ITC and OSWAL group, for providing the knowledge inputs and as a marketing system for the farmers.

He stressed for converting agricultural waste as wealth, use of organic farming practices and also generation of bio-fuels from waste lands in the villages should be taken as a mission of the rural sector. The educational institutions, active DRDA and the Joint Director agriculture in association with NGOs should become facilitators for these programmes.

Dr Kalam further said that in future conferences agriculture scientific community should involve the successful farming groups who had link with the industries and educational institutions. This will enable sharing of the experience and exact problems.

Dr M S Swaminathan, in his presidential address said Indian farming system has developed a technological fatigue which had to overcome to increase productivity and profitability of small farmers on economical and environmentally sustainable basis.

For that, the urgent task is bringing about synergy between technology, services, public policies and farmers enthusiasm, Dr Swaminathan said.

UNI