Govt committed to doubling farmers’ income by 2022, says Fadnavis

MUMBAI: Often under attack from the Opposition over agrarian issues, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday reached out to farmers and reaffirmed his government’s commitment towards working for doubling their income by 2022.

He also assured that the Prime Minister’s Crop Insurance Scheme will benefit “only the farmers and not private companies”. His comments came in the wake of the recent allegations of a scam in the scheme by parties like BJP’S ally Shiv Sena, the AAP and renowned journalist P Sainath. “Our target is to double the income of farmers by 2022. We are implementing various schemes of the central and state governments for farmers, and we are going to do it (double their income by 2022),” Fadnavis said.

He was interacting with farmers from different regions of the state through video conferenci ng. The g o vernment has approved ₹24,000 crore worth loan waiver for the state’s 51 lakh farmers holding bank accounts, he said.

The government has also made available over ₹10,000 crore fund through budget for the current fiscal to implement various schemes meant for them, he said in his over two hour-long interaction, called ‘Lok Samvad’.

He told farmers from districts like Jalna, Palghar, Ahmednagar, Chandrapur, Yavatmal, Osmanabad, Parbhani, Gondia, Jalgaon and others that the government was laying stress on use of modern technologies to help them tackle weather uncertainties. The government distributed compensation worth ₹15,240 crore to farmers whose crops were hit by natural calamities, he said. PTI