Budget 2018: Jaitley announced new plans for the Agriculture sector

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented Budget on Thursday. This is Arun Jaitley's 5th Budget being presented in the middle of a busy election year as eight states go to polls. This is just a year ahead of the 17th general election. At the outset of Budget speech Jaitley announced new plans for the agriculture sector.

• The Minimum Support Price of all crops shall be increased to at least 1.5 times that of the production cost.
• 470 APMCs have been connected to eNAM network, the rest to be connected by March 2018.
• Agri-Market Development Fund with a corpus of Rs 2000 crore to be set up for developing agricultural markets.
• Cluster-model approach to be adopted for agricultural production.
• Allocation in Ministry of Food Processing is being doubled to boost Food Processing; specialized agro-processing and financial institutions to be promoted by Government.
• Rs 500 crore for Operation Green.
• Restructured National Bamboo Mission to be launched with an allocation of Rs 1290 crore rupees to promote bamboo sector in a holistic manner.
• Fishery and Aquaculture Infrastructure Development Fund and Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Fund to be set up - total corpus Rs 10,000 crore rupees.
• Credit for agricultural activities rose from Rs 10 lakh crore to Rs 11 lakh crore.
• Removal of crop residue to be subsidized in order to tackle the problem of pollution due to burning of crop residue.
• The agricultural credit target was fixed Rs. 10 Lakh Crore for 2017-18, which is highest ever so far for a particular year. This year the credit rose from Rs 10 lakh crore to Rs 11 lakh crore.
• e-NAM (National Agriculture Market), a single-window online service integrating mandis (agriculture markets), was launched in April 2016 to let farmers and traders view all APMC (agriculture produce market committee)-related information and services, including commodity arrivals and prices, and buying and selling trade offers. This market helps the farmers to bid for the best price across markets.
• In the budget 2017-18, the government had announced a mission to link 585 Mandis to the portal by March, 2018. As of now, around 470 markets have been covered.