Odisha approves 'SAMRIDHI', the new Agriculture Policy for 2020

‘SAMRIDHI’, the new Agriculture Policy for the year 2020 for Odisha was approved on December 17 by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. 

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‘SAMRIDHI’s objectives include ensuring consistent sustainable growth in the income of farmers, ensuring that all policies also reach small and marginal farmers and ensuring stable and measurable empirical agriculture growth.

Saurabh Garg Principal Secretary Agriculture told media, "New Agriculture Policy is mainly focused on the things like crop diversification, market linkage and use of technology. We will focus on the diversification of paddy to the high-value crop during the rabi crop season.”

"Regarding the linkage with the market, we will focus on providing better market linkage to farmers by strengthening the mechanism what we have and thirdly our focus will be on the use of technology to increase the income of the farmers," he added.

The policy will also keep fisheries and livestock in focus along with the traditional crops. Garg stated that they will also emphasise on facilitating resources to the farmers for optimal use and opportunities for overall development. 

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'SAMRIDHI' stands for eight components - Science and Technology, Adaptation to Climate Change, Markets: domestic and global, physical and financial, Resource: use efficiency ensuring higher productivity, creating appropriate Infrastructure, Diversification of production to high-value agriculture, Human resource upgrading and skilling and strengthening Institutions.

The Finance department in Bhubaneshwar had sought suggestions from a cross-section of the demography of Odisha - members of the civil society - for the preparation of the annual budget for the financial year 2020-21.

The state government has been taking inputs from people to make the budget simple and people-oriented for past few years.

Finance Minister Niranjan Pujari had told the media that people and organisations can send their suggestions through email on odisha.budget@gov.in. Apart from this, they can send their views on WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS to mobile no. 9438161111.

He had said that suggestions from people and civil society organizations will be taken from December 18 to January 15.

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(With Inputs from ANI)