Long-term fund to achieve ‘per drop more crop’ `20K cr

The government’s decision to double the “long term irrigation fund” to `40,000 crore is in line with its commitment to invest more than `86,000 crore in five years starting from 2016-17. However, the speedy implementation is the key to bring in additional 80.6 lakh hectares under irrigation.

Mr Jaitley said: “A long term irrigation fund has already been set up in Nabard. Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced an addition of `20,000 crore to its corpus. This will take the total corpus of this fund to `40,000 crore. A dedicated micro irrigation fund will be set up in Nabard to achieve the goal, ‘per drop more crop’. The fund will have an initial corpus of `5,000 crore.”

Financial Chronicle was the first to report the proposal to create the `5,000 crore micro irrigation fund on January 12.

Last year, Mr Jaitley had announced the creation of the fund to complete 89 pending irrigation projects, which have been languishing for a long time. He had said these projects require `17,000 crore in 2016-17 and `86,500 crore in the next five years. “We will ensure that 23 of these projects are completed before 31st March, 2017,” he had said.

However, when the scheme was rolled out, a committee under the chairmanship of Chhattisgarh’s water resources minister found 99 projects for completion by 2019-20 which would ensure irrigation in extra 76.03 lakh hectares.

Out of these 99 projects, 23 priority-I projects with targeted irrigation potential utilisation of 14.53 lakh hectare, are planned to be completed by 201617FY and another 31 priority-II projects with targeted irrigation potential utilisation of 12.95 lakh hectare are planned to be completed by 2017-18.

has been announced by the PM as an additional amount to the corpus already set up in Nabard