17/03/2012 (Indian Express) - Highlighting that the agriculture sector has continued to perform “well”, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget proposals today sought to streamline plethora of schemes into specific missions and rolled out tax proposals to woo the private sector investment in the sector. The aim being to clear the bottlenecks in infrastructure and market linkages.

To merge various schemes under the agriculture sector into few and manageable set of missions — National Food Security Mission, National Mission on Sustainable Agriculture including Micro Irrigation, National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm, National Mission on Agricultural Extension and Technology, National Horticulture Mission, National Mission for Protein Supplement — Mukherjee announced launch of a National Mission on Food Processing to provide a fillip to post-harvest value addition in agricultural produce to meet changing consumer needs in the growing economy. Lauding the Bringing Green Revolution to Eastern India (BGREI) initiative under the Agriculture Ministry’s flagship Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY), Mukherjee rewarded the Ministry with about 18 per cent hike in the outlay for next fiscal at Rs 20,208 crore, that included Rs 600 crore of additional funds for BGREI over last time and a new initiative, ‘Vidarbha Intensified Irrigation Development Programme’, for the rain-fed cotton growing region of Maharashtra under the RKVY.

He also set a target of Rs 5.75 lakh crore of farm credit next fiscal as against the target of Rs 4.75 lakh crore during the current fiscal with continuation of interest subvention on short-term farm credit at 7 per cent and 3 percentage additional subvention for farmers paying on time. He also proposed a modification of Kisan Credit Cards to make them usable at normal ATMs.