Doubling farmers income

• Doubling farmers' income is a government initiative aimed at increasing the income of farmers in India.
• Goal - to double the income of farmers by 2022, which is the 75th year of India's independence. 
• Objective -The objective is to ensure that farmers get a fair price for their produce and are able to earn a sustainable income from farming.

The major sources of growth operating within agriculture sector are:

• improvement in productivity
• resource use efficiency or saving in cost of production
• increase in cropping intensity
• diversification towards high value crops

Sources outside Agriculture 

• shifting cultivators from farm to non-farm occupation.
• Improvement in terms of trade for farmers.

Strategy

The premise of the strategy for doubling farmers income is based on the following primary principles:

• Increasing total output across the agricultural sub-sectors through realising higher productivity.
• Rationalizing/reducing the cost of production.
• Ensuring remunerative prices in the agricultural produce.
• Effective risk management.
• Adoption of sustainable technologies.

Why Double Farmers' Income?

From self-sufficient food production to self-sufficient farmer -

• Past strategy for development of the agriculture sector in India has focused primarily on raising agricultural output and improving food security. 
• The net result has been a 45 per cent increase in per person food production, which has made India not only food self-sufficient at aggregate level, but also a net food exporting country.
• Strategy to promote farmers welfare-
• Farmer poverty, Reason of agrarian distress, Low farm investment

Challenges for doubling farmers income-

• Poor infrastructure-with inadequate irrigation facilities, storage structure, transportation network results in low return to farmer.
• Fragmentation of land- 86% of India's farmer are small farmers which ask difficult to scale up the operation.
• Agriculture policies issue- sometimes policies adopted by government are in support of trade and opening market which hurt Farmer
• Low productivity - low productivity of agriculture compared with other countries.
• Lack of institutional support ,Dependency on monsoon, Climate change, Price fluctuations 

Way forward

• The Dalwai Committee in Doubling the Farmers income had recommended substaintial reforms in Marketing structure including reforms in APMCs, and placing agricultural marketing in the Concurrent list
• Aligning policies-eg. greater procurement of millets instead of cereal centric procurement will help to increase income.
• Crop diversification - including high value crop which increase farmers income 
• Technological innovation - to increase productivity and profitability.
• Extention -to provide farmers with information regarding adoption of new technology.
• Food processing industries - will help farmers to decrease post handling loss and assured prices of products.
• Integrated farming systems- such as beekeeping, apiculture , sericulture etc.
• Promotion of FPOs- for better risk management and greater bargaining power.
• Diverting the excess manforce - would help to reduce burden on agriculture.

It is apparent that income earned by a farmer from agriculture is crucial to address agrarian distress (Chand 2016) and promote farmers welfare. In this background, the goal set to double farmers' income by 2022-23 is central to promote farmers welfare, reduce agrarian distress and bring parity between income of farmers and those working in non-agricultural professions.