President Pratibha Patil on Wednesday said the country needed another Green Revolution as the population growth is set to increase on already scarce resources.
"The land is limited but the demand for foodgrains has been increasing consistently.The Green Revolution enabled us to meet the rising demands so far, but now in the 21st century there is a need to usher in a new Green Revolution," said Patil, while addressing the V National Conference on KVK-2010, organised jointly by Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture and Technology, Udaipur and Indian Council of Agriculture at Mohanlal Sukhadia University auditorium.
She said dryland farming could be the cradle of the second Green Revolution. She began her speech recalling Mohan Singh Mehta, an educationist from Udaipur, who proposed the Krishi Vigyan Kendra when he was the head of ICAR committee.
Since then, KVKs have been established and they are working today from Kargil to Car Nicobar. Patil said by 2050 India's population would be 1.6 billion.
"We have to plan for the food requirements of such a large population," she said.
The President said strategies to make small holdings more productive should be made. A farmer is a stakeholder in every sphere of agriculture, she added.Their rights need to be protected. She narrated her experience at Syrian Centre of Agriculture and suggested Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar to visit that and plan accordingly. She said this is the decade of innovations and the farm innovations made should be cost-effective and locally planned.
The President honoured KVK Coonoor, KVK Kanchipuram and KVK Cuddalore for their outstanding performance.Three innovative farmers Chandra Shekhar Singh, Nand Kumar Shankarlal Jadhav and Surjeet Singh were also honoured by the President.
Union minister for agriculture Sharad Pawar annonced that all districts of Rajasthan which do not have a KVK so far will be sanctioned one by the Centre. At the request of chief minister Ashok Gehlot to sanction one Central university to Rajasthan, Sharad Pawar said that agriculture is a state issue so he would not intervene in the affair of the state but if the state government decides to open one, the Centre will provide all possible help. He claimed the agriculture sector will grow at a rate higher than 4% this year. He expressed the need to check the post-harvest losses.
Shivraj Patil, Governor of Punjab and Rajasthan, talked about measures to be adopted to develop agriculture. He said that the amount of known knowledge is much more than the knowledge used. He said that the available knowledge must be used to its full and researches to discover unknown knowledge should also go on.He said that each district should have at least one KVK.Private agencies and corporates should also help in setting up KVKs ,he added.
Union Panchayati Raj and Rural Development Minister, CP Joshi, appealed the KVK s to provide technical knowhow to those agencies and officers who are implementing and planning Mahatma Gandhi NREGA which has a budget of 40,000 crores.He said that to ensure national growth rate above 10% the share of Agriculture in GDP needs to be increased upto 6% to 8%.
Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot also remembered Mohan Singh Mehta and said that the latest technique in agriculture must reach the poorest of the poor farmers. He called for the use of IT in agriculture and said that without E-Governance there cannot be Good Governance. He pleaded before the Union Agriculture to give generous grants to the state of Rajasthan as it is an arid land and the villages are scattered which increases the cost of plan execution. He demanded one central Agricultural University for Rajasthan and more funds for already existing Universities.
